Using Dashboard filters to focus your data

You can use Dashboard filters to focus on a particular aspect of your audience data. Filters are available on all reports except Audience Overview and Author and Section Comparisons reports.

Which part of the Dashboard gets filtered?

As you begin to use Dashboard filters, you may notice that some data responds, whereas other pieces remain the same. This is by design but it may not be obvious at first. The thing to keep in mind is that filter location matters. We’ve designed the Dashboard so that when you select a filter, it only affects the information below that filter. Let’s look at some examples:

Unfiltered

Midpage filter

This refers to any filter that is located below any data display.

Top-of-page filter

This refers to any filter near the top of the Dashboard. This includes: Pulse/Historical, Posts/Videos, and Audience Segments.

Filtering criteria

We’re able to power the first ten filters with the metadata that you’ve provided.

1. Page type: All Pages, Posts, Non-Post
2. Author: select one or more authors or author groups
3. Section: select one or more top-level categories
4. Tag: select one or more tags or tag groups
5. Publish date: select preset values or use in combination with a historical selection
6. Word count: select < 500, 500-999, 1000-1499, or 1500+ words
7. Campaign: select one or more campaigns or campaign groups
8. Path: drill down into url path fragments
9. Syndication: available on the Posts page within a Network Rollup view to select All Content, Syndicated, or Local
10. Title: filter your posts by one or more words in a title
11. Metrics: Select the information you’d like to see for the posts you’ve filtered

Publish Date filter

The Publish Date filter includes three ways of selecting a date range:

• “Match Selected” – Clicking this will adjust the filter to match the dates you’ve selected from the timeline at the top of the dashboard screen.
• Predefined selections – We offer several predefined time periods, such as “This Month,” “Last 30 Days,” and “Older Than 1 Month.”
• Manual – You may type in dates in the “From” and “To” fields or click on the dates in the date picker below their respective field.

Path filter

Users have the ability to use URL path fragments as a filter when viewing post or non-post data.

A path fragment refers to the parts of a URL separated by slashes. For example, in the URL https://tea-fanatics.example.com/flavors/black-tea/earl-grey/, the path fragments are “flavors” “black-tea” and “earl-grey.”

Our path selection screen looks like this:

When making a selection, it will affect the downstream selectors. In the following case, there is no more paths beyond /parse-ly/ so we gray out the selector fields.

If your site does not have paths or if you’ve over-constrained the filters, you’ll receive a message saying “No data for the selected interval and filters”. In the case of docs.parse.ly, we have no paths and this is what we see:

Once you have selected a path fragment, you can click on the “Apply” button to see full information about URLs matching the pattern.

You can drill down multiple levels:

And you can even skip levels:

Paths are available as a filter in all sections of the dashboard as well as in the reporting suite.

Title filter

You can now filter your posts by one or more words in a title. Note that it’s case-sensitive. Use this to exclude posts with certain title words or to focus on posts with certain words in the title. Level up your filtering by then creating a Saved View you can refer to in the future.

This is available as a filtering option on the posts view in your dashboard.

Filtering logic

Starts with

Start typing to reveal this option. To use “starts with” logic, add an asterisk to the end of your search term. If you find yourself using this feature frequently, you may consider creating an author, tag, or campaign group.

Contains

The campaign filter includes a “contains” logic option, enabling more detailed filtering. This enhancement is available wherever you see the campaign filter, including listing pages, info pages, reports, overview, and goals.

Match any

Using this filter will give you a list of results that meet any of the criteria you entered. You would use “match any” when you want to see a list of content that’s about Donald Trump OR Twitter.

Match all

Using this filter will give you a list of results that meet all of the criteria you entered. You would use match all when you want to see a list of content that’s about Donald Trump AND Twitter.

Exclude

This filter removes any content or traffic that meets the specified condition. To see content that’s not about Donald Trump, you’d use a filter like this:

Using multiple filters

You can combine filters to get more specific results.

Filtering multiple aspects

Here, we’ve selected Page Type: Posts, Section: Science, and Tag: medieval-history.

Including one aspect and excluding another

The “show me this, but not that” logic comes in handy for authors and tags.

For instance, if you want to see all content about Donald Trump that doesn’t mention Twitter, the filters might look like this:

If multiple authors work on stories together, you may want to filter to see stories written solely by one of the contributors:

Filtering tips

Break your tags out into categories, such as content type, word count, or topic and subtopic to make filtering easier.

• Content type: type: report, type: feature, type: video
• Word count: word count: <350, word count: 350-700
• Topic and subtopic: health: hiv, health: depression

Read more about tagging strategies in our blog.

Reports: Lifecycle filter

The Top Listings report and export has an additional “Lifecycle” filter which allows you to see posts that are evergreen or evergreen candidates. This filter is only available for Posts.