There are number of web intelligence problems that I hear my clients/colleagues talk about that usually have fairly simple solutions. This segment of a yet-undetermined number of parts identifies some of these common obstacles and offers solutions for them.

Segmenting Large Websites Using Profile Filters in Google Analytics

If you’re involved in managing a large website, applying one-off filters to the default profile so you can look at a specific segment of the site can be time consuming.
Take this example: www.mysite.com/services/product-one
Many site admins will have the need to look only at the data associated with /services/product-one (the site segment).
This is especially true if there are many pages that are children of /services/product-one, e.g. /services/product-one/features, etc.
The way things are evolving, many would like to be able to treat these important site segments as an individual piece of real estate, and rightly so.

The Solution

From a web intelligence perspective, the answer is simple; create a profile for each product line that needs to be treated uniquely and apply an include filter so that all and only that segment’s pages are included in the profile’s data.
Here’s how it’s done:
Go to the site you want to manage and create a new profile by clicking “Admin” in the top right corner of the all accounts page:

 
 
Then select the property you want to add the profile to.
Once you’re there, click on the main property link:

 
Then select “New Profile”:

 
 
From here, select “Web Site” as the the data type, name your profile and select your time zone. Then click “Create Profile.”
Now let’s add the filter to the profile:
Drill into the profile by selecting it from the list. After you do that, you’ll see this screen:

 
Click on the “Filters” Tab.
Select “New Filter”
Make sure the “Create New Filter” circle is selected and give the filter the name that you’d like.
From here, select the filter type as “Custom Filter,” “Include” and the filter field as “Request URI.”
Enter the filter pattern to include all pages that are either the /services/product-one page, or its children by appending the regular expression .* to the request URI.
By our example, the filter pattern would look like this /services/product-one/.*
Here’s a shot of the whole thing:

 
Now hit save and BOOM! You’re all squared away. You now have a profile that you can access that essentially is like tracking a unique website that only includes all of the pages associated with a specific segment of your website.
Remember. Always keep a default profile that has no filters applied. 
See you next time on SOLVING PROBLEMS WITH GOOGLE ANALYTICS.
Let’s get tracking!