Comments on: Filters for GA Part 4c: Cascading Custom Advanced Filters

By: Business web design

Business web design — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:31:27 +0000

Hey, thanks for this Have been fiddling around with these filters and getting some good results.

By: John Rodriguez

John Rodriguez — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 01:38:19 +0000

Great post on “cascading” filters!

I’d always been kinda choked at having only “Custom Field 1″ and “Custom Field 2″ available for holding data. I’ve been puzzling over how to generate a specific report with a bunch of data for a client, and I think I’ve now got what I needed. Thanks!

With regards to the issue with using the comma in your constructor (“Shoes, Sandles, More — each of those would go into a separate cell in Excel”), Excel will not separate everything (Shoes, Sandles, More) if it’s enclosed in quotes.

In your second filter (Now associate Content with Source and Keyword), your Constructor would be:
$A1,”$B1″

This way the whole ad would go into one cell when you open the .csv in Excel. I just tested this out, creating a .csv in Notepad containing:
shoes,google,”Shoes, Sandles, More”

Opening it up in Excel, everything separates out into 3 cells properly. Interesting as well, the quotes get removed from the ad content…

By: Robbin

Robbin — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:19:27 +0000

Atiq, you now have to enable “import cost data.” You do it by going to ADWORDS, switching to the analytics tab from there, and then in the very basic edit (the top part of the most general part of every profile), you will have a box to check. You can’t get at it from http://www.google.com/analytics (you have to start in Adwords.)

By: Atiq

Atiq — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:02:05 +0000

Thanks for such a nice article. In fact I implemented these advanced filters on about 5 or 6 different Analytics Accounts (of off course different websites) and found great results.

All of these Analytics accounts were integrated with their respective AdWords Accounts and were show PPC queries in detail.

However, from 23rd March 2009, these filters (I created new profile in each account to use these filters) suddenly stopped working. Now there is no PPC visits data all.

AdWords campaigns for these accounts are still running. I can see AdWords data inside Analytics accounts in normal profiles.

The new advanced profiles with advanced query filters still showing other (organic, referral) visits but no PPC data, not even simple PPC visits.

It is strange as every thing was normal a week ago.

Any reasons? has Google stopped supporting some of variables or ……………?

Please help.

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:07:12 +0000

Thanks. That would be great to know!!

By: Robbin

Robbin — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 13:26:12 +0000

Hi Paul, Idris’s post is my oldest email (in my inbox). I don’t know the answer without testing, and I just haven’t done it. But it is an easy test and I will set it now (because I am feeling guilty) and maybe I will have the answer by the end of the weekend…

By: Paul

Paul — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:20:04 +0000

Hi Robbin

I’d be keen to know the anwser to Idris’s question. I am also trying to play with custom advanced filters but the filters seem to be removing hits when all I want to do is alter the info from them slightly into the user defined field. I don’t want to remove any hits at all.

Thanks
Paul

p.s. great posts on the filters and regex.

By: Idris

Idris — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:10:07 +0000

Hey, great articles. I am trying to do some advanced filtering, but I’m confused by the “Field X Required” option. If I say “Yes” to the requirement, which of the following two things does that mean?
[a] If the regex in this field does not match, do not include this hit in the profile at all.
[b] If the regex in this field does not match, skip this filter, and move on to the next, but still include these hits in the profile.

These two are obviously very different. Which does Google Analytics do?