Currently there are many tools to measure digital businesses and draw conclusions that allow us to improve decision making. One of the most serious and common problems that can arise when trusting the data that these tools give us is that they are not well implemented , so the data we obtain will not make any sense, or that they are not well configured by which the problem will be very similar, since the data that we observe in the measurement tool that we are using to obtain information from our website will show us "dirty" data and the decisions we make based on them will not be entirely optimal.

Almost all digital businesses, exactly more than 95% according to various studies, use Google Analytics to carry out quantitative measurement of their website. Therefore, below we are going to see how to configure 5 essential filters to optimally measure our website .

The first thing we should know before configuring and modifying options in our Google Analytics account is the structure of our account. Knowing how it is hierarchized will help us make a better configuration.

Let's quickly remember how the Google Analytics account is structured:

• Accounts : This is the main level where all the properties that belong to said account are located.
• Properties : this level is where the different views (profiles) that have been created for this property are included, we can configure up to a maximum of 50.
• Views : the last level of the Google Analytics account, this is where we will configure our filters, this way we can segment and organize our views. We can only create a maximum of 25.

Knowing the structure of our account, in the views section we advise you to have at least three created . A master view where we will make the filters and different configurations to optimize the measurement, another "backup" recovery/security view where all the raw data is, this way if we need to recover data we can always do it and finally a test view where we can test the settings and filters before applying them to the master view.

Well, we are going to start configuring our view to ensure that the measurement and data displayed by our website are as accurate as possible. We must go to the views, filters section and add filters:

Filter to exclude internal traffic (IP)

This filter helps us exclude internal traffic, that is, whether we are a company, freelancer or an individual, it is interesting to apply this type of filters so that the visits that are usually made to the website internally are not taken into account. To configure this filter we must go to the views section, click on filters and add filter.

Filter to exclude robots and spiders (spam)

Sometimes, we verify in our website traffic that there are sessions from domains with unusual or spam names. To solve this type of problem, from Google Analytics we can activate a tab that allows us to exclude all traffic that comes from robots or spiders, from This way we will keep our web traffic cleaner.
To activate it we must go to the view configuration and select the option that it shows.

Case sensitive filter

Sometimes we forget how we have configured our campaigns, media, event names, URIs, campaign terms, etc. Through them we can create a filter with the aim of homogenizing these search results that will help us access this information faster.

Find and replace filter

This filter is very useful for grouping names that we have used in the past and that we have now modified. Especially in campaigns, the names of the UTM are usually modified or each person usually uses a different name, so configuring this filter will help us have the information more organized.

Filter to include subdirectory traffic

In the case of many digital businesses or Shopify stores we can see that they also have a blog. These types of sections of the website are called subdirectories and sometimes we want to analyze their traffic individually. It is very important that in the configuration of this filter we select "that begin with" since if we choose "that are equal to" it will only show data from the blog home.

If we configure these essential filters in our online business or Shopify store, we will ensure that the information and data that Google Analytics shows us is more precise and clean.