Google Analytics 4 Gets Regex Filtering For Customized Reporting

Google has introduced a new capability for Google Analytics 4 (GA4), allowing you to apply additional filter types to reports.

Now, you can customize reports more granularly using match types such as ‘begins with,’ ‘exactly matches,’ and regex (regular expressions).

Detailed Insight With Report Filters

Filters allow you to customize the data shown in Google Analytics reports. Filtering can help you better understand your data, spot trends, and drill into specifics.

Report filters enable you to focus on the most relevant data in your reports by hiding the rest. You can find these filters above the charts when viewing a detailed report.

You can apply multiple filters, like looking at particular regions, app versions, or ad units.

Applying a filter will update the chart and table to show the data that matches your filter criteria. This allows you to zero in on the dataset you need to analyze.

Adding Filters with Match Types

The new match type filters give you three options for filtering data:

• Exact Matches: Filter to show data matching or not matching specific dimension values.
• Partial Matches: More flexible filters that allow filtering dimension values using ‘contains,’ ‘begins with,’ ‘ends with,’ and their inverse like ‘does not contain.’
• Regular Expressions (regex): Create complex filters to match dimension values following specific patterns or criteria.

The partial match and regex filters provide more robust and nuanced ways to filter data compared to filtering exact matches.

Filter Conditions

Filters are constructed by specifying criteria using dimensions and dimension values.

For example, you could filter the Platform dimension with Android, iOS, and Web values. Or you could filter on the Country dimension with specific countries as the values.

When you select multiple values for a single condition, it uses OR logic – meaning it will match any of those values.

When you have multiple conditions within a filter, it uses AND logic, meaning it must match all requirements.

Using The New Match Types In GA4

The new match types in GA4 open many possibilities for simple and complex filtering.

Here are some examples of how you can use the new match types to filter report data:

• Finding specific landing pages: Using “begins with” to show only landing pages that start with “/blog” or “/help.”
• Analyzing specific campaigns: Using “contains” to view metrics for campaign names with “summer_sale.”
• Drilling into specific devices: Using “does not contain” to exclude old iOS versions like “iOS 9” from your mobile data.
• Segmenting traffic sources: Using “ends with” to analyze traffic from a specific ad platform, like URLs ending in “facebook.com/ad.”
• Targeting specific products: Using regex to show only product pages with SKUs matching “d{3}-[A-Z]{2}-d{3}”
• Filtering bot traffic: Using “does not match regex” to hide bot user agents matching common patterns.

In Summary

GA4’s enhanced filters allow you to segment data to surface insights tied to your core SEO KPIs.

You can now create advanced filters to drill into the search engine traffic and landing pages driving results. Leverage match types like “contains” and regex to filter for specific keywords, campaigns, landing page types, and more.

The added filter precision gives you another lever to pull meaningful insights from analytics data.

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