Channels, filters & groups

Everything on the dashboard is built from filters. This page explains what a filter is, how filters are organised into channels, how to create, edit and move them, what the row menu lets you do, why the order of the rows matters, and where groups come in.

Filters are the building block

A filter is a rule that claims visits by where they came from: a parameter in the landing URL, a referring site, a search engine. Every visit lands in exactly one filter, and when a conversion happens, the credit goes to the filters of the visits before it. A filter is therefore the unit of attribution: a row that can receive spend, visits, conversions and revenue.

Most of your filters are made for you. The default channels cover search, social, email and the other ways people arrive without clicking an ad, and each connected ad platform creates a filter per campaign, with its spend. You add filters for everything else: an affiliate, a newsletter, a partner site, a podcast sponsorship, anything you can tag with a parameter or recognise by its referrer. The Dashboard Builder shows what you are not filtering yet.

Channels organise filters

A channel is a top-level row of the dashboard: a filter standing on its own, such as Direct Traffic, or several filters together, such as Organic with its search engines or Google Ads with its campaigns. A channel can contain sub-channels when the source has that shape; an ad platform's channel holds its campaigns, and a campaign can hold its ad sets. Moving a filter from one channel to another changes how the dashboard is organised, not which visits the filter claims.

What a filter can look at

A filter is one or more conditions, combined with and or or, on one of five things:

• URL parameters in the landing URL, such as utm_source equals affiliate and utm_campaign equals spring. The most common kind, and the one every link you control should be tagged for.
• Referrer, the site the visitor came from, such as visits from partner.com.
• Organic, a search engine as referrer with no advertising parameters in the URL. The default Organic filters are built this way.
• Event, visits during which a given event was fired, with its properties if needed. For special cases, such as a signup form that cannot carry parameters.
• Path, the landing page path. Reserved for hidden landing pages that are not reachable from your site; for seeing which pages convert, use Show Paths on any row instead, described below. Set up Path filters with our help.

Matching is on the value containing, equalling or beginning with what you enter, so one filter can cover a family of campaigns.

Order matters

When two filters would both claim the same visit, the one higher on the dashboard wins. The order of the rows is therefore a setting, not decoration: put narrow filters above broad ones, the affiliate's spring campaign above the affiliate's catch-all, or the broad one takes everything.

Filters created by ad integrations sit above everything you create yourself, whatever the dashboard shows. A filter of your own on utm_source=google will never see the clicks from your connected Google Ads account: those visits carry Google's click id and are claimed by the integration's campaign filters first. The same goes for Meta Ads and the other connected platforms. Your own filters see what the integrations leave.

Creating, editing and moving

The plus button above the rows adds a filter, a channel or a group, and takes a CSV of filters when there are many to create at once.

A new filter needs a name and at least one condition; the editor shows the five kinds as tabs. Save, and the filter appears on the dashboard and starts claiming visits after the next data refresh, including past visits that match, which move out of Unsegmented Traffic into it. Visits are rebuilt from your current filters, as Visits & Visitors explains, so a filter added today sorts yesterday's traffic too.

Arrange turns on dragging. Drag a filter up or down to change its priority, or into a channel to move it there; rename a channel you created, or delete an empty one. Turn dragging off to get sorting by the metric columns back. The search finds a filter or channel by name when the dashboard is long.

Your own filters can be edited at any time from their row menu. Filters an ad integration created can be edited only when that integration builds them on UTM parameters, which matters when your ads carry custom tracking the platform does not know about; each integration's page says whether its filters are editable. Google Ads and Meta Ads filters match on the platform's own click ids and have no editor.

What you can do with a row

Every filter and channel has a three-dot menu. What it offers depends on the row.

• Show Paths replaces the row's filters and sub-channels with its landing pages, each with the visits, conversions and revenue credited to it. It works on any channel or filter, which is how to see which pages convert for a given source, and the reason a Path filter is almost never needed. Show Filters switches back.
• Open in Cohort Report opens the same row in the Cohort report. Debug in Dashboard Builder opens it in the Dashboard Builder, with the raw visits behind the numbers.
• Open in … manager jumps to the campaign on the ad platform, for Google Ads, Meta Ads, Microsoft Advertising and LinkedIn.
• Change name renames a channel, except those an integration manages. Edit filter opens the editor; Edit Group does the same for a group.
• Hide Channel, on a top-level channel, hides it in the current view, where hidden channels collapse at the bottom of the dashboard; see Saved views. Disable, on a filter or channel an integration created, archives it: it stops claiming visits, releases the ones it had, and comes back by itself if the platform reports new spend. Direct Traffic and Unsegmented Traffic can be neither edited nor disabled.
• Ad Destination URLs, on Google Ads, Meta Ads and LinkedIn rows, lists the landing URLs the platform reports for the campaign, the first place to look when a campaign shows spend but no visits. Google Ads also offers an extended list.
• Add to Group puts the row into an existing group or starts a new one.

Above the rows, a warning icon, Filter Alerts, appears when a filter has spend but no visits.

Spend belongs to a filter

Spend is a property of a filter, never of a channel: a channel's spend is the sum of its filters, and a group's the sum of its members. Filters created by an ad integration receive their spend from the platform once a day. Any other filter, an email tool, an affiliate, a sponsorship, a print campaign, can carry spend you enter yourself: open the filter's spend and add amounts by date, or upload a CSV of dates and amounts. The dashboard then computes cost per conversion, profit and return on that spend exactly as it does for an ad platform, and a filter with spend but no visits raises a Filter Alert.

Groups add rows up

A group is a row that sums other rows. Pick filters and channels, Google Ads and Meta Ads for a "Paid" group, your brand campaigns across platforms for a "Brand" group, and the group shows their spend, visits, conversions and revenue added together: in the example below, $15 of spend and $80 of revenue from the two paid filters. A group does not claim visits and does not take anything away from its members; a visit counted in Google Ads is still counted there, and the group counts it once.

Groups are made from the plus button or from any row's Add to Group, and edited from their own row menu.

Managing at scale

When there is more than a handful of filters to make or move, the Dashboard Builder is the place: it shows your unsegmented traffic by parameter, referrer and path, creates filters straight from it, and lets you manage filters and channels in bulk.

If you have any questions please reach out to [email protected].