Welcome to Part 4 where we’ll look at the Google Analytics profiles and filters. You can find the previous chapters of the guide here:

1. Google Tag Manager
2. Tracking code
3. Check the implementation

4. Profiles and filters

Here’s how the current GA hierarchy works: User – Account – Property – Profile.

The truth is that when you’re done with adding your tracking code to your website, having just one profile is not enough to do proper work. Here is a list of profiles you should have for one ID:

• one untouched profile – the raw data profile
• one live profile
• one SEO profile – exactly as the clean one, but show (not provided) landing pages
• separate profiles for each domain / subdomain if you have such
• multiple profiles depending on the number of goals / conversions

The raw data profile

As a best practice, leave the first profile of a property as the master profile. It shouldn’t have any filters to exclude or include sections of the data from the site being tracked. Thus we’ll have a profile that contains all historical data since tracking began and it’s very useful for testing purposes.

Live profile

It’s good to clean up our data in the Live profile. Here we’ll want to see the full URL of pages (use it if you’re tracking subdomains or multiple domains; by default Google Analytics shows just the URI), match the hostname and exclude our own IP addresses. Here are the 3 types of filters we need to setup for this clean profile:

Full URL

Match hostname

Exclude your own IP addresses

 

SEO profile

There are several great posts on SEO related GA profiles:

• tracking image search
• showing landing pages for (not provided)
• tracking Universal search

 

Profile per domain / subdomain

If you’re tracking multiple domains and/or subdomains you may want to create a separate profile for each of them.

 

Profile per 20 goals

By default one Google Analytics profile can hold up to 20 goals (4 sets of 5 goals each). If you have a bigger number of products you want to create goals for or you need more than 20 goals for some reason, you’ll need to create a new profile for them.

 

Go to the next chapters of the guide:

5. Settings
6. Goals setup
7. Virtual pageviews and events
8. Campaign tracking
9. Advanced segments and custom reports. Dashboards.
10. Custom alerts

Or jump to the whole thing: Google Analytics Implementation Guide.

Still have questions? You can ask them as comments below and I’ll try to answer.