Reports created in Google Analytics turn data into insights that take your marketing to the next the level and give you a leg up on the competition. However, there are times when a report contains more data than we need to answer a simple question such as a count of page views for a story. This is where using Filters can help you get the information you need quickly and easily. Filters let you create a smaller subset of your data and In-line report filters are one of the most helpful Google Analytics features for quick analysis.
What is an In-line Report Filter?
In-line report filters allow you to segment your report’s data quickly without having to create custom reports or applying advanced segments.
For example, we want a quick and easy way to see the number of page views on a website for stories from April 2nd to April 8th, 2017:
We would begin the process by going to a property/view of the website in analytics.google.com
Then we see that the Google Analytics interface categorizes reports into four major segments: Audience Reports, Acquisition Reports, Behavior Reports & Conversion Reports. In this example, we will click on the Behavior Reports option and then click on the “All Pages” report.
The All Pages report shows data of all the pages on the website. However, we only want to see the story pages so we will need to apply a filter to show only the data we want. In this example, we know that all the story pages on our website include the word “story” in the URL. Therefore, by typing the word “story” in the in-line filter and then applying this filter the report will only show the pages that contain the word “story” in the URL.
By applying the word “story” to the in-line filter the standard report segment now shows the count of page views for the story pages.
As you can see, using In-line report filters segment data quickly without having to create custom reports or applying advanced segments!
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