CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-analytics
sevzas
sevzas

Reputation: 801

URL Manipulation With Google Analytics Advanced Filters

In Google Analytics, I have a view for a web site in which I'm trying to use Advanced filters to codify a transformation on the "Request URI" field:

When I view the traffic in the Site Content..All Pages report, I don't want to see any values of "/[productid]" in the URIs in the "Page" column - I'd like all visits to a particular product page to roll up under a URI like "/product/warranty" or "/product/description".

Unfortunately I find it difficult to try figuring this out on my own because of the lag in seeing results in Google Analytics after making a change combined with my shaky grasp of how regular expressions are utilized in Advanced Filters.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1187

Answers (2)

Pat Grady
Pat Grady

Reputation: 307

GA Advanced Filter

Assuming your [product id] was 3 or more consecutive digits, ie: /product/123456789/someproductscreen then this would work:

  1. Advanced Filter
  2. Field A: Request URI: ^/product/\d{3,}(.*)
  3. Field B:
  4. Output to: Request URI: /product/{id}$A1
  5. Check Field A Required and Override Output Field

GA Advanced Filter configuration using regex

The above configuration will rewrite the Request URI from:

/product/123456789/someproductscreen
/product/12345
/some/other/url

to:

/product/{id}/someproductscreen
/product/{id}
/some/other/url

You mention you'd want to see /product/warranty. This would obscure the edit. My suggestion is to leave a placeholder with the edit. I use {id} but it could be any string, ie. <product id>

Level Up the Regex

Link to regex101 example

Regular Expressions are used by GA Filters, in the above example we used regex to match a product ID that is all digits. We did this using the regular expression:

^(/.*/)(\d{3,})(.*)

This is true when Request URI has root folder (/.*/) followed by three or more digits: (\d{3,}) Finally, we capture the remainder of the URI using (.*). We used groups so we can access the values in a later step.

GA Advanced Filters can persist groups extractions from Field A and Field B. We use this feature to rebuild a Request URI using the Output To -> Constructor. Below is an example of condensing dynamic Ids to a static string:

$A1{id}$A3

$A1 will extract 1st group from Field A. $A3 would extract the third group from Field A if it were to exist. {id} is a static string that is a placeholder for the dynamic value.

If your product id was a mix of alphanumeric, then we'd simply need to find a pattern that matched. You didn't provide any examples of ID, so here are a few examples of common ID patterns found in URLs:

 [A-Z]-\d+          // matches Z-764537389
 \d{4}-\d{3}-\d{2}  // matches 1234-123-12

Easy mode right? What about if you have a RFC4122 compliant UUID in the URL you need match? No problem:

[0-9a-f]{8}-[0-9a-f]{4}-[1-5][0-9a-f]{3}-[89ab][0-9a-f]{3}-[0-9a-f]{12}
// matches 0df98a02-c438-4c57-8d1c-2f6041804e2c

Note: GA Advanced Filter Regex is case insensitive by default, this can be overridden in the filter settings.

Upvotes: 1

Marco
Marco

Reputation: 1172

Here https://regex101.com/r/kRUJnU/1

Start playing with this tool it ll become really helpful on the future since personalized filters with regex matching and capturing groups are REALLY important in GA.

EDIT: How to go from regex101 to GA.

In the image below you can see how i deleted the last part of URLs when they are something like:

www.mysite.com/vuelos/carrito/checkout/46787654567898765

Or something like:

www.mysite.com/vuelos/carrito/46787654567898765

GA filter

Upvotes: 0

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