Just a quick post on a very cool trick I recently learned from my colleague Mike Plummer.
If you’ve ever tried to bookmark a report in Google Analytics or share a report URL via chat, you might have noticed that some of the report’s criteria isn’t included.
For example, here is the URL in my browser bar for the top content report for Jan 1-31, 2011:
https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/top_content?id={profile id}&pdr=20110101-20110131&cmp=average#lts=1296578679097
Now lets say I want to add a page filter (at the bottom of the page) to only show URLs with “google” in them. After I’ve added the filter and clicked Go, the report now only shows URLs with “google” in them, but the URL has not changed!
If I were to bookmark the URL and come back to it later (or send it to a colleague) the report would not include the “google” filter you just added.
But there is a simple solution!
1. Click on the “Email” button on the top of the report (next to Export button)
2. Click on the “Back to report” text link at the top of the page – right underneath the “Set Up Email:”
3. You’re done!
Now the link in the address bar looks like this:
https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/top_content?
id={profile id}&pdr=20110101-20110131&cmp=average&
rpt=TopContentReport&segkey=request_uri&q=google&qtyp=0&tst=0
As you can see, the page filter information is now included in the URL and when returning to this URL you’ll get exactly same same view!
Thanks again to Mike for the awesome tip.
Analytics Impact 
Great idea. Thanks Mike and Ophir.
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Oh gosh, this is such a simple little trick, yet something *extremely* helpful!
Can’t count all the times that I’ve been cursing that you can’t share reports with their settings properly. Thanks for sharing this!
Good trick.
You can also use the “View Full Report” link after adding a filtered report to the Dashboard.
Hi John,
Good point though from my experience most of these reports never make it to the dashboard.
Maybe Google will simply add a “Permalink” link on the report page :)
This is SO useful in so many situations, thank you.
I often keep notes in a Mindmap when doing analysis projects and I like to include links to the key source reports in there. But if there was a lot of in-line filtering in use, for one example, those links were not quite as useful as they could be.
This makes a big difference. Thanks
Neat trick.
Hi Ophir, I have used this a lot already, absolutely a great feature.
Ps. I created a link on my blogroll to this blog ;)
Thanks Andre!
You have a great blog as well :)
Great help. Thanks a lot :)
This is really an awesome tip for the older version. The new version urls seem to update properly which is great.
I did notice that in the new version you can type directly in the address bar and the page will update in real time with each keystroke, so it can shave a few seconds off of your time when you’re filtering keywords or bounce rates, etc. Beats going to the advanced filter menu each time. (I put some text in the filter box at first just to find out where that value would appear in the url)