Last Updated on March 20, 2023
In this quick video we’ll show you how to set up new views of your data in Google Analytics and talk briefly about why Google recommends that you should have multiple views.
It is best practice to have at least two views for each property. One should be a master view which has no filters to include or exclude any sections of the data. Once this view is set up you should not touch it. This ensure that you have a complete record of all the data for your site since you began tracking it.
When you start adding filters to the data then the data which is filtered out will never be accessible to you through that view so without a master view the data will be lost forever. It is also a good idea to have a test view which you use to test out filters, custom reports and so on before you deploy them ‘live’.
You can have up to 25 different views of your data. Some common uses of views and filters include:-
- Filtering out internal company traffic from your Google Analytics stats by IP address
- Filtering out referral spam and other spam traffic
- Views that concentrate on certain sections of your data e.g. just PPC traffic
- Particular views for particular teams / groups of staff
- Geographic views for particular regions e.g. just USA traffic
