Transcript for How to Filter Data for Your Website in Google Analytics 4

[Tiffany Sellwood, Presenter] Hi everybody, this is Tiffany from MetricsEdge, and I wanted to demonstrate today how to isolate your website’s metrics inside of the Global Analytics GA4 (Google Analytics 4) account.

I’m here at the homepage, and the first step is to navigate to the report that you are interested in. So, in the report
section, we have groups of reports regarding Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization (which really doesn’t apply),
Demographics, and Technology.

If I want to just look at engagement with my site content, I’ll go to the Engagement section and then Pages and screens.

Once this report opens up you’ll see top Pages and screens, how many Views, Users, Use per user, etc.

I’m going to actually open this up to be a little bit bigger because it defaults to 10 rows.

So, this is all great, however the problem as a website owner is that now I have to sift through all the data throughout all of the websites at the University, rather than just looking at what’s important to me, which is my website.

So, there is a capability to filter this report. You simply go up to the top and hit Add filter, and then you tell Google Analytics what dimension you want to filter to. So, in this case we’re going to include the Page path and Screen class and then you have to give it the value.

So, let’s say I just want to look at the Housing pages. I can type in ‘housing’ and I can either select specific pages (which I don’t want to do because I want to look at all the pages) and see which one performs the best and the worst. So, I’m going to hit All values containing ‘housing’ and now you hit Apply.

And now, the entire list is just pages off of the Housing website.

So I can see how many views each page is getting, how many users, how many events are happening on each page, in conversions, and etc.

One thing to note is that, unfortunately, if you navigate to another report…let’s say we want to go to the Events report.

You will notice that we are now back to square one and your filter is gone. That is, unfortunately, a feature in GA4 that
they have not yet addressed and we’re hoping that they do.

You know, allow filters to be persistent across all reports.

In the meantime, however, if you want to go to multiple reports in one setting you will actually have to create that
filter one more time.

There is a way to actually create an Exploration report that you can save and come back to whenever you want and not
have to rebuild every time.

So if you actually go into the Explore section this is where all the custom reports happen, and you’ll see that MetricsEdge is making all kinds of reports. These are specific to the user, so you won’t see mine in here unless I’ve
shared it with other users.

So, if you do build a report here, don’t worry. It will only be shown to you unless you click the Share button and share it with others.

But in this case, let’s just start with a blank report and let’s say again we want to look at the top pages for our website.

I need to call this…give this a name…so I’m going to call it Top pages, Housing, and here is where we build out the
report. We need to add our dimensions and our metrics.

So first, I’m going to add the Dimension, which is Page path and Query string. There’s a lot of options here, but you’re going to want the Page path and Query string, and then we’ll import that.

And then, for the metrics, we want Views, we want Engagements…actually, sorry…Engagement rate is what
we want. Events…actually, that is actually Event count, not Events.

And, let’s see, what else…maybe Conversions. And then we want to import those all.

Right now, we need to drag these over to our table. So, for Dimensions, we want our Page path as our row, the values we’re going to want, Views, Engagement rate, Conversions, Event count, and now we have all the top pages similar to what we saw in the Reports tab.

But unfortunately, here again we have everything and not just the Housing site.

So, in order to customize this, I’m going to go down here to Filters and select Page path and Query string, and I want the filter to contain Housing. Hit Apply.

And now I should only see Housing pages. And if I want this to be larger than 10 rows, I can go to this drop-down here and select more than 10 rows.

And, if I want to change this date range, I can do so over here. I can add a comparison date range, so I’m going to compare to the previous period. Hit Apply.

I can see these Page views versus the previous period, see what’s growing and what’s waning, and now this report will be available to me any time I hop into GA4 and go to Explore.

So, just again, if I go to Explorations now I see Top pages, Housing, and I can click on that any time and access that report.