: I don't know if this was true in 2011 when this question was asked but as of 2017 (and for at least a few years before) it was not ideal to use filters in GA for the situation described.

@Murphy175

I don't know if this was true in 2011 when this question was asked but as of 2017 (and for at least a few years before) it was not ideal to use filters in GA for the situation described.

The reason for that is that Google Analytics uses data sampling when generating reports and that sampling occurs before filters are applied.

Here's a concise explanation of tracking users across sub-domains.

You also probably want to add the hostname to your reports (otherwise it's difficult to separate traffic to the home page / of all of the domains) so have a look at this tutorial.

Additionally, it's not unheard of that your GA tracking code ends up sending hits from another domain...might be a dev or staging site, might be someone copied your content, might be spammers.

So it's useful to be able to see that and restrictive filters like described would probably complicate that...no matter what you should always have one unfiltered view.

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