SEO & Digital Consultant
As I’ve pointed out on Twitter, I’m officially a co-author of a book called “Mastering In-House SEO” alongside 26** other amazing co-authors! In the book I describe my adventures at the former company I had worked at for the past 5 years over at MoneySuperMarket. I go into a little detail on how we changed… Continue reading
I am delighted to announce that I’ve registered a business called “Switching Limited”. My experience of working in the Financial Services space at MoneySuperMarket has allowed me to have a good view into what should be provided to consumers and how to provide a service in consumer & business energy switching. I’ve kept the name… Continue reading
I’ve been thinking of doing my own roundup of those who have shared really interesting methods in doing their day to day jobs in the SEO community. There really is a lot that is shared online by SEO practitioners – and it’s always hard to follow what’s been posted online or to even remember going… Continue reading
This time last year in 2018, I released a Google Data Studio template for Google Search Console via the native connector in Data Studio. It’s one of my most shared tweets and articles on this website, and hopefully I have helped a lot of people with it. In the Christmas spirit, I thought I’d share a… Continue reading
So one of the questions I asked John Mueller in a Google Hangouts recently was – Is it possible to have FAQ page mark-up and product review ratings simultaneously? Or something like that. It is a genuine question as development resource has to go into getting structured data applied in complex content management systems, and… Continue reading
The premise of this post is to outline how I’ve personally gone about combining Google Search Console and Google Ads (formerly AdWords) data on a query, device and overall level. This should hopefully give you an idea of how you can go about combining these two data sources to create either your own dashboards or to… Continue reading
Our friend, Alan, over at the Google Data Studio team today confirmed an official fix via the Issue Tracker on when they are going to fix a bug with chart specific calculated fields with blended data sources. I’ve been waiting since November last year for this fix, so I’m actually extremely happy this is being… Continue reading
Quickly writing this up, as I need to publish this for a much larger post I’m due to go out with regarding chart-specific calculated fields around combining Google Ads and Google Search Console data via Google Data Studio. What’s the issue with Chart-specific calculated fields? The background to this post is simple: there is problem with… Continue reading
Table of Contents Design – make your reports sexy Add enough features, but not too many Learn how to filter reports Calculated fields & custom calculations Blending Multiple Data Sources I thought I’d write up this post as I’ve received a few queries via email off the back of the Google Data Studio report I… Continue reading
Google Data Studio has a lot of functionality when it comes to filtering, and I use the filtering constantly, least not the default “filter control” options that are available which allow you to filter by dimension:
However, I got this question from someone using the report I created and shared yesterday (Google Data Studio Alternative to Google Search Console – exporting by date) about filtering out the Query data to NOT contain certain queries and I was going to simply respond to the comment saying that you’re able to use Regular Expressions (see the ‘Query -> REGEXP’ example above) to do exactly that. You can see this question below:
As an aside, I am so humbled and pleased by the fact that so far on Twitter, the response to sharing the report has been massively well received, we’re about 266 likes and 89 re-tweets in and my phone is still buzzing away as I write this at 8:11 AM. Dawn Anderson, who I hugely respect in the SEO industry, also shared the post on LinkedIn!
Not to detract from the subject of this blog post, so going back into it: what if you wanted to remove queries that just were not relevant for your report in Google Data Studio?
So, if you’ve already got a snazzy report setup, and you want to either 1. Filter out the query data to only contain certain queries or 2. Filter your queries to not contain certain queries, on a more permanent basis, then this is all feasible within the powerful filtering options that exist within Google Data Studio.
All you need to do is go to ‘Report settings’, which you can find in the top left hand corner menu under ‘File’:
Once you click ‘Report settings’ a menu will open up on the right hand side of your monitor:
The option that we’re looking for here is the ‘ADD A FILTER’ option. In Google’s own words, this is what this does to your report:
Configuring a filter in the report settings panel sets it as the default for the entire report. All components that share the same (or similar) data source are affected by the filter. You can override this by turning off filter inheritance for a selected component.Google Data Studio
So we can conclude by adding this filter, it’ll impact your entire report.
Once you click that ‘ADD A FILTER’ option, you’ll be presented at the bottom of your screen to ‘Create a filter’ – I won’t screenshot this as I’ve got a lot of images on this post already. Once you click that, you’ll be presented with the below filter options and you’ll have the ability to ‘Exclude’ or ‘Include’ and then the option to filter directly by dimension:
Going back to the original question, Andrew Coco wanted to filter by Query to exclude certain keywords. In this report, I’ve setup a very basic filter that will exclude the Query dimension, with strings that contain ‘youtube’ from the Site Impression table:
This then removes all traces of the word ‘YouTube’ from the entire report.
I can see where this might be useful, as you’ll be able to setup reports that exclude branded search terms or that might only include branded search terms.
Because we set this up via the ‘Report setting’ section in Google Data Studio, all of the charts in the report will inherit this filter. You’ll be able to see if this is the case by selecting any of the charts in your report:
You can simply toggle off or on this filter as you wish and even setup a chart specific filter, depending on what you’re trying to achieve.
That should hopefully answer the question in probably a certain amount of detail that Andrew Coco was not expecting, but it was a good question, so I thought I’d give it a good answer. 🙂
I think my next blog post for Google Data Studio is showing everyone how you can create drop downs that allow you to toggle easily between groups of keywords that you’ve grouped together through creating Calculated Fields, so that you’re able to, for example, create a drop down menu that will give you the option to filter from branded search queries to generic search queries. This relies on using Google’s CASE function, which is yet another powerful part of the platform.
Stay tuned!