Google Analytics Tips & Tricks - Multiple Keyword Filters
February 5, 2009 – 12:03 pm by Dan CristoAs a search engine marketer, one of the most useful reports you can show to a client is an increase in non-branded traffic to their web site. This tells the client you are capable of getting their site ranked for keywords other than their brand mentions, and that the keywords you’re optimizing for are bringing in additional traffic to the site.
Now generating a true non-branded report can be complicated if the client has multiple brand terms. So here I’ll show you a little trick in Google Analytics which can help you pull this data without having to go into Excel to use multiple filters.
Start by selecting the proper profile and data range for your report.
Now select in the left navigation: Traffic Sources -> Keywords.
Make sure you select “non-paid”
Now you should have a list of all keywords driving natural search engine traffic to your site. Here you’ll want to exclude all branded keywords, so you’re left with the non-branded ones. Just scroll down to the bottom of the page, select “excluding” and enter your branded term inside the below field.
Now this takes care of a single brand, but what if your web site has multiple brands, or sub-brands or common mispellings? There isn’t an option to exclude multiple branded terms is there? There sure is! You see, that field accepts regular expressions, which means that you can use a pipe to add multiple filters.
This tells the program to, “exclude term1 AND term2 AND term3″ from the keywords. Once you have your refined list of keywords you can easily report on traffic, goals or whatever metric you desire.
Dan Cristo is a search engine optimization specialist at Zeta Interactive.
24 Responses to “Google Analytics Tips & Tricks - Multiple Keyword Filters”
Here’s another post on the same subject with some additional visuals http://leadgenseo.com/2009/01/08/excluding-keywords-in-google-analytics-this-or-that/
By Tim Staines on Feb 5, 2009
Thanks Dan. I’ve been wondering how to do this for a while. Great tip.
By Dave on Feb 6, 2009
Thanks Dave. I too didn’t know about this little trick for quite some time. In fact, just last week someone asked me how to filter out multiple branded terms, and I told them to export the data into Excel.
Now I know better, and thought I would share it with everyone.
By Dan Cristo on Feb 6, 2009
You can also setup an advanced segment that excludes branded keywords. If you are gonna pull this reports more than once, that’s a more efficient way to do it. Avanish Kaushik posted a great articles on how to do this and other ways to use advanced segmentation:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/10/google-analytics-releases-advanced-segmentation.html
By Bill Cook on Feb 6, 2009
Knowing how to properly dissect Google analytics will be crucial when it comes time to running reports for clients.
By Nick Stamoulis on Feb 6, 2009
Bill - Thanks for sharing that link. It’s a bit lengthy, but worth the read.
Both this tip, and advanced segmentation method basically do the same thing. The difference is that setting up an advanced segment can be a bit intimating for casual GA users. The advantage of course is that you can save the segment for future applications, as well as apply the segment to all reports, as opposed to a single report.
It’s still good to know how to do both I think. Again, thanks for sharing.
By Dan Cristo on Feb 6, 2009
Thanks and I agree. Both are useful. Just a moment ago I had the need to pull a list of non-branded keywords and your method is a good, quicker way of glancing at this data.
By Bill Cook on Feb 6, 2009
Hi Dan,
It’s very informative post, i’d applied it for my website.found it very useful. now i m going to share this information on my blog also.
Keep sharing.
By Dipali on Feb 7, 2009
@Bill - Yeah, this way is quicker, but doesn’t allow for “exact matches” which is too bad. Advanced segmentation is needed for that.
@Dipali - Thanks for the comment Dipali. I’ll continue to add new tips that I find.
By Dan Cristo on Feb 10, 2009
Exactly what I was after - cheers for the tip Dan!
By inkodeR on Mar 18, 2009
Nice…
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By Alex on Jun 7, 2009
This is a nice tool and almost everyday i use it. If you are working on SEO then you will also use it regularly to check if your site is optimized by your targeted keywords.
By Web Design Bangladesh on Jul 1, 2009
The common tool every webmaster must follow for SEO performance. Thanks to share with all.
By Web Designers London on Jul 4, 2009
Nice, Thanks
By Googee on Oct 17, 2009
Thank you, You have created a beautiful page, search easily able to find what.
By sivas sohbet on Nov 15, 2009
This tool is used by most of the people who is doing SEO.It really helps.
By Harry Swift on Nov 21, 2009
Google Analytics have been one of my favorite tools has a web developer
By Yanick Belanger on Jan 3, 2010
That’s handy. Thanks for sharing this.
By vancouver web design on Feb 17, 2010
Really well written and explained article !Keep us posted on Google Analytics !
By lace wedding dresses on Feb 28, 2010
thanks for your helpful tips.
It solved my problem
By shortweddingdresses on Jun 14, 2010
Have you managed to export this data? When I try to extract it into a csv file I get all keywords from my account, not the filtered list.
By David Corman on Jul 25, 2010