At the end of 2009 Google added advanced filters to Google Analytics. This addition allows users to quickly filter data using a set of parameters, it even supports regular expressions to help you remove lots of irrelevant data quickly. The new filter can be found at the bottom of any content report. Simply drag your mouse to the bottom of the content report and you should see the filtering options (see image below)

This tool makes it easy to filter unwanted data from your content report. It achieves this by allowing you to filter any metric by one of the following methods:

• Containing – a value to include
• Excluding – a value to exclude
• Less than
• Greater than – greater than a value
• Less than or equal to
• Equal to
• Not equal to
• Greater than or equal to

For example I might wish to filter my results that contain the keyword ‘insurance’ and have a conversion rate of higher than 2%. This will give me all the insurance terms that are greater than 2% conversion rate.

This tool would also come in useful if you were trying to remove all brand terms from a content report. You could simply use the exclude parameter and us to OR operator. For example for Marks And Spencer you could enter the following ‘ M&S | Marks And Spencer’. This will allow you to see the traffic for non branded terms, allowing you to view the more keyword related terms you are after.

The filtering tool is very powerful and filters lots of data really quickly, allowing you to make quick decisions about your marketing.