Welcome to this weeks SEO video tutorial, Most webmaster are familiar with Google Analytics and the data that it provides can help towards your websites development with both organic SEO and internet marketing.

Filters can improve the flexibility of Google analytics, allowing you to modify and customize data to suit your business.

Some of the more popular filters include:

• Removing traffic from internal sources (Checking your own listing.)
• Restricting data for a particular profile
• Customizing reports

Filters can be great, but they are permanent to a particular profile and once Google has passed the data through a filter it cannot be re-processed, filters forever modify the data within a profile.

For this reason we recommend that you set up a raw data profile before implementing any filters, we found the best way to do this is to apply filter to a new profile and keep any existing profiles as the raw data one.

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To set up a new website profile, go to your analytic settings next to the domain name on the right hand side and click ‘add new website profile’.

Ensure that you ‘Add a Profile for an existing domain’

Give the profile a name and make sure the domain and time zone is correct and click ‘continue’.

You will then see the profile appear in the analytics settings.

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Now you have set up your profile, can start to use either default filter applications or create a custom filter.

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To create a filter click the ‘edit’ button next your new profile.

Click the ‘add filter’ button next to the ‘Filters Applied to Profile’ option.

Here you have 2 options ‘Add new filter’ or apply ‘existing filter’.

You can use the ‘Apply existing Filter to Profile’ if you want to apply the same filter to multiple profiles.

For new filters, give the filter a name.

Next select either, Predefined filter or Custom filter.

You now have to select a filter that suits your target, we will show a simple example of excluding our own IP. This is so that our own Google queries and clicks don’t influence the reports shown.

To do this select: exclude > traffic from the ip addresses > that are equal too > enter IP address.

And save changes.

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The example shown was a simple exclude filter, but the custom filters are composed of 3 main parts:

1. Filter types -
   Exclude, Include, Lowercase/Uppercase, Search and Replace, Advanced.
   
2. Filter fields -
   Filter fields represent a wide range of information, I have attached a list in the resources on the supporting blog post.
   
3. Filter pattern -
   This can be exact matches of data or use data as part of regular expressions.

We hope this helps customise your data from Google analytics, The Google conversion university has a video blog on filters and profiles, which we have also added to the supporting blog post, this expands on filter types.

Thanks for watching.

Resources

• http://services.google.com/analytics/breeze/en/filters/index.html
• http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55588