: Advanced GA Filter - What does it do? I've inherited a website's analytics set up - and there are several filters as in the example below. I'm trying to figure out what they do - but a

@Alves908

This restructures the way an url is displayed in GA.

It uses a regular expression, i.e. pattern matching, on the request uri (the url a visitor has called). The parenthesis are capture groups, i.e. the matching values are stored in variables. The variables originate in field A, so their name begins with "A", and they have to numeric index that matches the order in which the values where caught.

So "$A1" in the example would be "parent", $A2 would be "profile" and $A3 was caught via a wildcard (the dot means "match any character" and the star means "zero or more of the preceding character", so this matches everything). If the url was /parent/profile/foobar $A3 would contain foobar.

Output to Constructor allows you to fill a data field in GA with the result of your filter. The person who constructed the filter wanted the urls to be displayed in a certain way that's not identical to the actual structure of the url - so (s)he choose to overwrite the orginal url with the modified url from the filter.

For the example "/parent/profile/foobar" this would have resulted in a url displayed in the reports as "/parent/settings/profilefoobar" after the variable placeholders have been replaced with the caught values.

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