How Do You Apply A Filter In Google Analytics?

In my previous article, How To Spot Referrer Spam In Google Analytics, we took a look at the different ways to identify referrer spam in your Google Analytics data. In this article we are going to look at how to banish the referrer spam from Google Analytics. So let’s get started.

Go ahead and venture over to the Admin section in your account. You will notice that there are two references, “All Filters” under the Account section and “Filters” under the View section. We are going to work in the “All Filters” to create a global filter that can be used in any reporting view. This is beneficial if you have several web properties in your account. Once you create a global filter you can easily copy it into other views in your account.

Navigate to the “All Filters” section and click on the “+New Filter” button. We are going to have to create a custom filter.

Create A Custom Filter

1. Under Filter Type we are going to select “Custom”
2. Select the “Exclude” selection
3. Choose the “Referral” selection in the drop down
4. In the Filter Pattern field we will add the root domain
5. In the Apply Filter to Views section
   1. Select the view(s) and hit the “Add” button
6. Save the filter

How Do I Filter Referrer Spam From Historical Google Analytics Data?

When you create a referrer spam filter in Google Analytics it will only start to filter out any future spam. The filter will not affect any of the historical data. In order to look at your historical data without the referrer spam you will need to create a custom segment.

You can navigate to your Audience Overview dashboard and click on the “All Sessions” button. This will display all of the default segments that Google Analytics offers. So let’s go ahead and click on the “+New Segment” button.

Create New Segment

1. In the left navigation pane select “Conditions”.
2. Change “Include” to “Exclude” in the drop down.
3. Select Acquisition and choose “Source”.
4. Select “contains”.
5. Enter in the referrer spam domain.
6. In the top right adjust the “Segment is visible in…” to your preferred setting. The default is to allow any view in the account to have access to this segment.
7. Hit “+Add Filter”.

You should see in the right column how the new segment will affect the number of sessions when the segment is in use. Now you can hit the “All Sessions” button to display the list of available segments. Keep the “All Sessions” checked off and select your new segment (i.e. Darodar.com Referral Spam). This will show all the data minus the referrer spam for historical data. Just note that segments will default back to “All Sessions” when you log back into Google Analytics.

This should help clean up your Google Analytics data. Now go back and start analyzing!