Filtering with Easy Insight and Google Analytics

One of the biggest strengths of Easy Insight is the ability to easily slice and dice the data through ad hoc filters. Starting from the perspective of the report editor on Google Analytics:



In this report, we've dragged Browser and Visitors into the list to the right, the default report type. You'll notice that there are a set of tabs in the report editor along the top of the screen, one of which is Filters. By default, when you're using Google Analytics, there will be a time range filter. This filter defaults to showing you data for the last week. You can change this filter in a couple of ways. First, you can change the entry in the combo box to something else, say, the last month, to see the last month's data instead.

You can also change the filter type entirely to create something with a little more flexibility. Click on the Edit icon next to the filter to pop up the edit window:



Go ahead and change the dropdown here to "Fixed Date Range" and click save. You'll see that the filter changes over to give you a slider, with date pickers on either side of the filter. You can adjust this around to give you a particular time window and perform various types of historical analysis.



Next, we can add an entirely new filter. Just as you can drag fields from the left hand list into the report to create ad hoc reports, you can drag fields into the filter tab to create ad hoc filters. Try dragging operating system into the filters tab:



You'll see that you're given the option of creating three different types of filters here. Combo box filters give you a single selected value, multi value filters let you restrict reports down to certain subsets of values, and pattern filters let you apply wildcard and regular expression filtering on strings. For this example, let's stick to doing a combo box filter. The result of releasing the field in the filter box is a combo box containing all of the operating systems that have visited your site. You can change this entry to change the results in the report.

You can easily apply new filters or change existing ones to quickly slice and dice your Google Analytics data in Easy Insight, gaining new levels of insight into how people are visiting your website, following your advertisements, and everything else that Google Analytics offers!