There are three must-have filters for your analytics account spambot filtering, excluding internal IP addresses, and forcing all pages/referral sources to lowercase.
First written up by Krista Seiden Aug 4 2015
Krista Seiden is an experienced leader in the digital analytics industry living and working in the SF Bay Area. She has led analytics & optimization at companies such as Adobe, The Apollo Group, and most recently at Google….
You can read her detailed post here.
I have boiled it down to the basics here: The mechanics of creating the filter are simple.
Create a new filter
Name the filter
Choose either Predefined or Custom Filter
Click Save
1. Spambot Filtering
This one is super easy because it’s a simple checkbox on your ‘View Settings’ page. In the admin section, navigate to the ‘View Settings’ page and scroll down until you see the checkbox for Bot Filtering. Check it. There ya go, it’s that easy to filter out a known list of bots and spiders – all you have to do is check the box and Google applies the filter in the background, checking against a known list of bots and spiders.
2. Excluding Internal IPs
First, in Google Analytics, navigate to the Admin section of your Google Analytics view. Then, under the View Settings menu, select ‘Filters’. Select ‘New Filter’. You should see the following filter setup screen:
3. Forcing URLs to Lowercase
We can also use a filter to clean up our data. For example, sometimes a website will show the same page regardless of the case of the URL — uppercase, lowercase or mixed case. You may have pages with URLs such as ThankYou.html, thankyou.html, and THANKYOU.html, and without a filter to force them all to the same case, they would show up as three separate pages in a pages report in Google Analytics.Three Must have Filters for Google Analytics