Custom Filters For GA, Part 3c: User‑defined Tagged Links

April 27, 2007

How do custom filters work for the six options you might attach to a link that you would create in your e-mail marketing, or in your Yahoo! search ads: campaign name, source, medium, term, content and ID? If you want to learn more about some of those options (as opposed to the filtering), check out this blogpost by Meredith Smith from ROI Revolution.

This is an easy one (that’s why I did it today, when I am supposed to be on vacation.) As always, you give the filter a friendly name, you choose Custom, you choose the action you are interested in — for example, do you want to an include filter? — you choose one of those six filter fields I specified above, and you write your regular expression.

So let’s say that you are writing an include filter for just your paid search. We know that Google calls it cpc, but you may have tagged it as ppc in your Yahoo or MSN ads. (Side note: having a filter like this, and applying it to a new profile, would be incredibly helpful, because then you would be able to apply all your GA tools against just your paid search.) Here’s what the filter would look like:

Google Analytics Paid Search Include Filter

Notice the Regular Expression — the filter pattern — at the bottom. cpc|ppc. The pipe in the middle means OR, so this will capture and include only visits that came on a paid search where the search was coded with cpc OR ppc.

End notes: Many thanks to ROI Revolution for updating their blog with our new www.lunametrics.com/blog info (Yes Tim, you were right when you wrote this comment.) Also to June Li (who has to suffer with me at the Summit), and to Justin Cutroni (who loves creating a separate profile for important campaigns like cpc), both of whom updated their info. And then there is Jacques Warren, who shoes I try to fill at the WAA. And how about this one, AutoJini? (AutoJini, you have to write a comment and introduce yourself to the WA community, or maybe just to me.) And of course, the Benri Blog. I would write about future blog posts coming from Benri, but I don’t want to put too much pressure on the author. Thank you all for updating your info. It comes through slowly in WordPress, I just saw the link from Mine That Data, and I know that Kevin Hillstrom did that update a week ago…

Robbin