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Oct 29
2008

Cleanup your URLs with Search and Replace Filters

web analytics  By: Allaedin Ezzedin 6 Comments »
If your site has dynamic URLs then you might have a hard time making sense out of your data in Google Analytics.

If for any reason you cannot convert your dynamic URLs to friendly URLs…search and replace filters are the answer!

The screenshot below demonstrates the nightmare some people might experience when they view content reports.

In order to make the URL readable, we have to identfy the parameters that we want to change. In our above example the URL contains three parameters: departmentID, CategoryID, and ProductID. We first create a “search and replace” filter for each department, category, and product. Then we replace each dynamic parameter with easy-to-read text.

  • Create the “Search & Replace” Filters

Filter# 1

Filter# 2

Filter# 3

  • Now apply all created filters to a test profile and verify data accuracy before applying to your regular profiles.

Your content reports will now look like this:

Note:

  • We do not advice using “Search & Replace” approach on e-commerce sites because you will have a very large number of filters.
  • The easiest way to never have to deal with dynamic URL addresses is by using friendly URLs at the development stage.
  • You can use tools such as Apache’s mod_rewrite to present clean URLs to both your visitors and your web analytics application.
  • Clean URLs will have additional benefits such as helping with your SEO campaign and improving conversion rates..

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 5:21 PM and is filed under web analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Cleanup your URLs with Search and Replace Filters”

  1. Yomna Omar says:
    October 30, 2008 at 2:34 AM

    Good job!

    Simple, and into the point… i liked it.

  2. Angela says:
    November 18, 2008 at 3:13 PM

    Nice post. So if the filter string represents only a portion of the URI, will GA only replace that segment of the URI or replace the whole URI given there are no other filters?

  3. Rehan Asif says:
    November 19, 2008 at 10:35 AM

    Hi Angela,

    GA will only replace that segment of the URI.
    If you wanted to replace the whole URI, you would have to use an Advanced filter.

  4. Alan Chandler says:
    December 29, 2008 at 5:38 AM

    I am puzzled by your use of ? in ?DepartmentID=33. Isn’t the ? a regular expression character that needs to be escaped?

  5. Rehan Asif says:
    December 30, 2008 at 4:51 PM

    Hi Alan,

    You are right. I’ll get the post’s author to update the screenshots.

  6. Allaedin Ezzedin says:
    December 30, 2008 at 7:49 PM

    Hi Alan,

    You are absolutely right. The search field is a regular expression and the replace field is any text that you wish to use to replace the original text.

    The screenshot is updated now.

    Thank you,

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