From the course: Google Analytics: Spam Proofing

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Understand filters

Understand filters

- [Instructor] To prevent spam from getting into your Google Analytics we're going to use filters. Filters prevent data from entering Google Analytics. I like to think of them like a water filter. It doesn't change the data at all but it will catch anything bad and make sure that it doesn't get through. We'll be using filters to make sure that we're only tracking legitimate traffic. And we'll be using several types of filters. We'll be using exclusive filters which prevent specific types of data from coming in. A good example would be excluding your home IP address. Any traffic from that IP will not be logged. We'll also look at inclusive filters. Where we say only include data that looks like this. A good example is languages. Language codes have a specific structure. So if you see something with an incorrect structure it's probably spam, and you can filter it out. The inclusive filters do tend to be a lot harder to set up. You have to be really really careful not to exclude…

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