Copy filters in Google Analytics across different accounts

 

Hi ladies and gents.

This post isn’t typical for my blog, rather than sharing information or thoughts I am now more interested in your opinion on a specific topic.

If you are do not use Google Analytics, you can probably stop reading this post, it will be hardly interesting or useful for you.

The problem: copy filters in Google Analytics is impossible (between GA accounts)

I have recently found that it is impossible to copy filters in Google Analytic across different accounts and it was pretty annoying discovery. Moreover, there is almost no free or paid 3rd party tools to do it. To be precise I found one non-functional Chrome extension and one paid service.

The need in this functionality appeared when I have found that my data in Google Analytics suffers from Google Analytics referral spam.  If you haven’t encountered it you are either lucky or haven’t check your GA reports referral section for a while. The way to deal with this, at least one of recommended is to build appropriate filters and apply them to website you track using Google Analytics. This is fine, however if you manage multiple websites on separate Google Analytics account (that is often a case when you consult clients) you have to manually rebuild these filters for each account.  IMO it isn’t the funniest job – time consuming and prone to errors.

Aside of fighting of spammers, coping filters may be useful in other occasions, like excluding your own computer/network IPs from reports to name one.

The solution

So I decided that there may be a need in a tool that allows people to copy filters across different Google Analytic accounts. I did some researches and have found that it is technically possible (with use of Google API).

Next thing I engaged a developer to test the concept and build very rough prototype of the solution, just to make sure that it works. We spent some time playing with API and here it is – rough and ugly, but working prototype that I can use for my own needs has been built!

Now the question – will this kind of tool that copies Google Analytics filters from one account to another be useful for you?

I have solved my problem, but now I think – maybe other marketers, analyst, managers can be interested in a web app that allows this simple, but overlooked by Google operation?

I really appreciate your opinion guys. It it is something that interest you, can you sign-up in the subscription form at the bottom?

My plan there, if there will be enough interest from community is:

• to make a version of the tool that anybody can use
• keep it free for use at all in short and mid-term
• later on maybe develop some premium functionality (depends of feedback from people who use it), keeping basic version free or move to open source/public domain or do both

So, sign-up below if you are interested and feel free to ask questions or share your opinion in comments.

Also, I will appreciate if you spread the word in social media, the bottom line there is that I am willing to invest time and money in this project if I feel strong enough interest from the community.

UPDATE

I’ve decided to make the code I have so far open-source, it is available at Github

Open to discuss further project development