Working with Advanced Table Filtering in Google Analytics

Hopefully, everyone had an awesome Thanksgiving holiday filled with fun, family, and food! Did you stand in line at 4AM for Black Friday? Yeah, me neither.

Anyways, now that mostly everyone in the U.S. is back to their normal routines (including me), we can talk about a brand new feature that Google Analytics released last month called Advanced Table Filtering. It’s found at the bottom of all standard report tables in Google Analytics and it allows you to do some pretty neat “on-the-fly” deep analysis of any data set.

Advanced Table Filtering lets you filter the rows in a table based on the conditions that you specify, just like when you create an Advanced Segment and apply it to your profile. This new feature, along with Secondary Dimensions and Pivoting (which were released earlier this year) can help your analysis efforts tremendously!

To start using an Advanced Table Filter, scroll to the very bottom of any of the “standard” looking report tables in Google Analytics and find the blue Advanced Filter” link, next to the regular table filter:

While you can still use the standard filter that allows you to contain or exclude data from a report, you can create an “on-the-fly” advanced segment by clicking on “Advanced Filter”. When you do, the table expands and you get to design your Advanced Filter:

In the example shown in the image above, I want to see only Google traffic that has a bounce rate less than 50% and an average time on site greater than or equal to 180 (3 minutes) in my All Traffic Sources report. This specific criteria took me all of 10 seconds to create and “Boom!” my All Traffic Sources report just got a whole lot more segmented:

Now, I get a better sense of how my Google traffic is receiving my website content, which points me in the right direction to start optimizing my site, my pay-per-click campaigns, or my email marketing efforts!

Advanced Table Filters should be activated within all Google Analytics accounts soon, so that you too can perform cool “on-the-fly” table segmentation like me!