Want better quality Google Analytics data? With analytics filters (or Advanced Segments they call them) you can add filters enhance the way you view data.
Personally – I view my site a lot to make sure it’s working, to check comments and generally just to make sure everything is running smoothly. When I view my analytics data – especially since I don’t get thousands of visits a day (yet 
)- the visits I personally make on my site can make a big difference on how I analyse the data.
Now some of you may say – well that’s easy – just create a filter to remove your IP address. Unfortunately a lot of computers these days have a dynamic IP address meaning every time you log onto the internet you will have a different IP address than you had before. So it’s not as simple as removing yourself based on IP address.
My solution is to create an analytics filter to get rid of my CITY. The only problem with this solution is that I will be removing potential real visits from my home town that I won’t be able to track if I use this filter. (Also keep in mind you can change between a filter that you’ve created and go back to the default with a click of a button, so you don’t lose anything by applying these filters)
Another problem may be that you’re getting a lot of visitors coming to your site that don’t even visit your site for 1 whole second! I’ve created an analytics filter for that as well.
Below are the two filters I use – Removing my home town/city of Brisbane, Australia and only showing visits when they’re at the site for more than 0 seconds. I’ve also added in how to combine the two.
Analytics Filter – Remove Home Town/City
1. Log into Google Analytics
2. Click to Advanced Segments and click on + Create new custom segment
3. Under Dimensions (in green) click visitors to show a drop down menu
4. Drag City into the dotted box where it says ‘dimension or metric’
5. On the Conditions drop down box select ‘Does not match exactly’ This is a very important step and can sometimes be missed. You want to see the results where people DO NOT come from your home town (i.e. yourself).
6. Type in the name of your city. In my case it is ‘Brisbane’.
7. Name your segment. I’ve named mine ‘Visits not from Brisbane’
8. Click the Create Segment button. That’s it you’re done!
You can now go back to your dashboard and in the top right position there is a drop down menu All Visits. Under the drop down you should find your newly created advanced segment. Click on this, then apply to see how many visitors you get excluding the ones from your city.
Simple, right! 
Now I’ll show you how to only display quality visits when users are on your site for longer than 0 seconds.
Analytics Filter – User On Site More Than 0 Seconds
1. Log into Google Analytics
2. Click to Advanced Segments and click on + Create new custom segment
3. Under Metrics (in blue) click Site Usage to show a drop down menu
4. Drag Time on Page into the dotted box where it says ‘dimension or metric’
5. On the Conditions drop down box select ‘Greater than’ This should already be the default option.
6. Type in 0 as the Value
7. Name your segment. I’ve named mine ‘Time on site greater than 0′
8. Click the Create Segment button. That’s it you’re done!
To see if it worked properly – go back to your dashboard once again and in the top right position there is a drop down menu All Visits. Under the drop down you should find your newly created advanced segment. Click on this, then apply to see how many visitors you get excluding which are staying on your site for longer than 0 seconds.
Analytics Filter – Combine the two filters into one
1. Follow the steps above, when you get to adding the second condition click the Add “and” statement link and repeat the steps for Analytics Filter – User On Site More Than 0 Seconds in the new slot (or the Analytics Filter – Remove Home Town/City depending on which one you already have up)
2. Name your segment and click Create Segment. That’s it – you’ve just combined 2 basic filters into one more complex filter!
By placing this analytics filter I feel there is a much more accurate measure of what your users are doing on your site. You can guarantee all your own visits won’t be counted and you’ll actually get tracking data based on users that are actually using your site.
There could be many reasons why Google Analytics shows visits at 0 seconds. I’m not 100% sure but they could be search engine spiders crawling your site or bots of some other sort. Perhaps people are visiting your site when they didn’t mean to and close it before the Google Analytics code could load properly. What do you think?
I hope you’ve found this helpful and I hope you apply these analytic filters to your site to get a better measure of what your users are up to.
Edit:
Turns out you can actually share filters! Let me know if these work for you (you will have to change your city to wherever you live)
Time on site greater than 0 seconds
No visits from x city and time on site greater than 0 seconds
I would urge you to try out your own filters so you’re at least getting your hands dirty a little bit. Don’t under estimate having experience! I would love to see what handy filters you have come up with. If you do – let us know in the comments below!
If you enjoyed this post you may also enjoy:
How I Set Up Google Analytics To Track My Blog Stats
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filtering visitor based on crtieria is very useful.suppose you are targetting some geographical location it is quite handy.
Intrigued by zero second visits. Did a little digging, beware of the following that I found in a forum:
A visit of 0 seconds duration usually means that the visitor only looked at one page, a ‘Hit & Run’. Because there was only one page, the stats can’t guess the amount of time they looked at that page.
Visitors from a search engine or portal who hit & run usually indicated one of a few things:
1) They didn’t want your site – you can tell this by tying out the hit & run visit info to the search terms that were used at the portal to get your site listed in the query result. I don’t know how/if your counter can do this, in which case you might want to investigate something more robust.
2) The visitor didn’t find what they wanted on your landing page – Search engine optimzation is a whole big category of its own; if someone searched for ‘fuzzy dice’ and didn’t find fuzzy dice on your page, but you do have fuzzy dice on your site, you want to make sure that when they land on your site that they do indeed see fuzzy dice. Again, check your keywords and make sure that they are part of the content. Don’t go overboard, as doing ’stuff’ to make your pages appear nice for the search engine spiders will typically result in a penalty for your listing.
3) Spam traffic can be identified by the a) lack of request for collateral files (graphics, etc) and/or b) the referring site name and link information. Check your stats. Remember that the spammer is just trying to increase the inbound links to their site, so you should disregard them yourself if your counter does not do that for you.
4) A bug with your counter – that should be pretty obvious, as you would not have any stats at all. They are pretty much all or nothing.
I’d suggest you proceed as follows:
A) Determine if they were ‘real’ visitors
B) Look at why a Hit & Run clicked on your listing in the search result
C) Does your page answer their search query?
@Zeesu – Good to see you’re alive and well Zeesu! You can do a lot with google filters to get different sorts of results and data to analyse. The trick is to find the right data that will be beneficial to analyse based around your site/business.
@Sebastian – Thanks for sharing that. I figured a good portion of the 0 second visitors were people that mistakenly came to the website then left before the page loaded.
I found this post the other day http://www.bloggingtips.com/2009/12/03/google-analytics-gets-faster-better/
basically it records the user data before everything else loads on your page. Gone are the days of putting google analytics code at the bottom of the page, if you check out this post you will get instructions on how to place the code in before the closing head tag.
I am still experiencing a few 0 second visits though since transitioning but not as much.
Never tried Filtering in Google Analytics. Thanks. Will give it a try.
@Agent 001 – Let me know what filters you come up with.
I’d love to know what others are coming up with in terms of GA filters.
Thanks so much for sharing this. I use Google Analytics and I never knew about this. I just followed your instructions step by step, worked perfectly. I’m definitely going to be visiting your blog more often, for such helpful advice… Kind Regards.
This is something new. Never know that we actually can enable this. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Sarge. Nice info. Google Analytics is indeed very advanced in its features. May be someday I will need those features, like the filter you mentioned here.
awesome and the screen shots are super helpful!
Good idea bro…. I’ve been using google analytics for some time now… but never used any filters…. must try them out right now
So did you guys create any filters that I didn’t mention on this post? Would love to hear what you have come up with!
Wow, this looks like a lot of stuff to go through.
I have a simpler idea – not visit your web site yourself, for a whole month. What do you say? lol
@Codrut – It’s not that much, I’ve just made it as detailed as possible so no-one would get lost. I think it’s important to check your website often to make sure it’s working fine. Oh, and to reply to comments