Back to Basics: Filtering Keywords

If you’ve ever wondered how to make sense of the long lists of keywords that appear in your reports, this week’s tip is for you. Look at the bottom of most tables in Google Analytics and you’ll see an Advanced Filter option. With this option, you can filter the data in your table according to almost any set of conditions you wish.

Let’s say you’re only interested in keywords that brought in visitors who spent at least 2 minutes on your site.

When you enter the condition for Avg Time on Site, you’ll need to use seconds. So, here, we’ve entered 120 seconds (=2 minutes).

Or, perhaps you only want the keywords with a bounce rate of less than 30%. (Make sure you use .3 for 30%. So, for example, .05 is 5%, .25 is 25%, and 1 is 100%.)

You can even enter multiple conditions. In this case, we want to weed out all the low traffic keywords as well.

Advanced Filters are a great way to focus on your most important keywords. To see this example in action, watch this short video.

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team