Google Analytics adds advanced filters in content reports

by Patrick Altoft on November 6, 2009

Yesterday Google added an Advanced Filters tool to the content reports allowing users to filter using a number of different parameters. The tool even supports regular expressions.

The filter can be seen at the bottom of the keyword or content reports and allows you to drill down into the information in a much more intuitive way than the previous filtering options allowed, mainly because it’s no longer hidden away in another section.

Below is an example where I drilled down into a keywords report to find all keywords containing the word “car” with an per visit value greater than Â£8 and a conversion rate higher than 20%.

advanced-filters-large

A top tip is to add a few different keyword sets using the | operator to mean OR. For example “cats|dogs|mice” would match all 3 keywords. If you’ve got a favourite filter post it in the comments.

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.

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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }

Steven Morgan 06 Nov 2009 at 12:57 pm: Spotted this yesterday – looks really useful for long tail analysis. Will post a few filters once I’ve tested them out.
tag44 06 Nov 2009 at 2:11 pm
Find me on Digg | Facebook | Reddit | StumbleUpon | Twitter: Its good that Google has added this new feature in analytics, wait i have to check this with my new keywords and filter the results.
More comments from tag44
Paul Friar 07 Nov 2009 at 2:30 am: Hey Patrick, Great info! I really need as much information as I can find regarding keywords when trying to setup my own business. Regards, Paul.
Clem 08 Nov 2009 at 9:32 am: Filters I use quite a lot allows to split by number of words in the search phrase:

Only one word:
^[a-z,0-9]*$
at least two words:
^[a-z,0-9]* [a-z,0-9]* (add a dollar sign at the end for exactly two words)
at least three words:
^[a-z,0-9]* [a-z,0-9]* [a-z,0-9]* (add a dollar sign at the end for exactly three words)
etc.

These regex will exclude search phrase containing non-alphanumerical characters, so if you happen to have search phrases containing those (c++, c#…), you can insert them the characters between the brackets, comma separated.
Todd Allison 08 Nov 2009 at 11:16 pm: I spent some time on Friday with these filters – I wasn’t sure how long they had been around, but they do appear to be useful.