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.