Set Internal URL Filters

Hi, my name is Daniel, and I’ll be sharing with you information on how to set up internal URL filters for your report suite in Adobe Analytics. So, this setting determines which referring URLs are considered external to your site, and which are considered internal. And this is important because it determines how several important Reports & Analytics are populated. So, we want to get this right. First, from the report suite manager page, click on a report suite, then mouse over Edit Settings, General, and then click on Internal URL Filters.

This is the page that allows you to set up these filters, again, to differentiate between the external and internal URLs. Now, let me first define what a referrer is, a referring page is, and what an internal URL is. So, a referrer is the page that immediately precedes the page that you’re tracking. So, for example, if a visitor came to your site via Google then Google would be the referrer. If they came from a third-party site that had a link to your page, then that third-party site would be the referrer. And if they’re browsing around your site, if they click on the homepage and then click to another part of your website then the homepage would be the referrer for that next hit. So whatever page precedes the one you’re tracking is the referrer. It’s important to know which ones are not your page and which ones are. And this is how we determine that. So, I’ve set this up to, you know assuming your domain is widgets.com, the internal URL filters should include your internal URL.

I’ve set it up this way on purpose. Notice there’s a dot the beginning. On the next line here, there are two slashes at the beginning. The reason for these is as follows. The dot prevents other domains from matching. So, say there’s a website out there called funwidgets.com. Well that, if I didn’t include the dot at the beginning of this, would also match the current filter and be considered an internal URL to your site, even though it’s really not, or, you know, maybe it’s greatwidgets.com, other websites that you use that part of the domain would be counted internal if you don’t include this dot. So, the dot prevents that from happening. Now, the two slashes are included because some websites don’t require entry with a www at the beginning, the sub domain of www, right? That’s not required necessarily. And so, this allows that to match the filter. So, if you do have sub domains and you don’t want to include them as internal URLs, you can always exclude the dot, this first version, and just put in the entire URL. And that would exclude all sub domains. So, there are different ways to set this up. Set it up the way that matches what you want to consider internal and that would exclude everything that’s external. Again, this setting affects several important reports, important to get it right. Now one more thing before I close the video and that is, when you go in here, you may see just one filter and it’s just a dot, a period only. Now that’s a default setting. It’s not intended to be used. It’s just a placeholder. The reason it’s there is because the pages report shows external URLs as Other and since every URL has a dot in it, this allows the pages report to be populated in case nobody goes in here and sets this up. So, it’s a placeholder. It should be changed. If you see it, just remove it and add your own internal URL filters there. Thank you. I hope this helped. Have a wonderful day. - -