Writing this post to share some interesting tips around advanced search section, to leverage the tool feature to the fullest. I'm sure you would have accomplished most of your work pieces just with straight forward options that avail in search or advanced search criteria. But, by understanding below few tips could make you feel much better, and also boost confidence in dealing with very granular data, if never used.
++
[space] between phrases would consider/function as [OR] operator
Ex, if you enter <home page> as search phrase in the search box of pages report,
you will get all the rows containing term <home> or <page>, as space in between phrases acts as delimiter.
Make use of quotes ("home page") in such cases.
++
Prefix hyphen [-] to any term would function similar to option DOES NOT CONTAIN
Ex, Assume that, report had also captured few internal test page hits. Search phrase with hyphen(-) prefix would negate rows containing such phrases. Ex, for my case I would keep my search filter <-test> to suppress all my test pages.
What if a URL already contain hyphen(-) and wish to retain; I meant to have my filter funnel pass such. Then backslash(\) must be used to suppress the negate functionality within search box, as shown below.
<\-test>
++
Use [AND] & [OR] operator efficiently; remember these are case sensitive
Although we have match criteria like <If all match>/<If any match>, we can use AND & OR operator to make advanced filter much more effective.
Lets say I want my reports to show ONLY products pages from US and UK region.
Filtering for region alone would pull pages other than products folder, or filtering for term products would pull out pages other than above said 2 regions. So I will make use of OR operator as shown below, now page from either US or UK region would be selected first and then again filter for folder products in them.
Remember match criteria should be <If all...> to ensure it goes one after other.
Let me brief one more example to leverage the AND operator as well.
Consider below scenario,
1. All pages from UK region
2. Only products pages for US region
* filtering for just 'products' and 'US' and 'UK' should work, but not with <If all match> criteria as it might results in no data.
So, here it is
++
Filtering rows while co-relating two reports
Remember your condition should execute on both base report as well as report being co-related with base report.
By now you may have better clarity of how filter works when match criteria is <If all..>
Actually I wanted to filter out internal search term for the selected region, in regions report.
So first try to have the data filtered from base report(regions) & then from report being co-related(internal search terms).
So, I 'd config my filters as,
1. filter to pass only rows from US & Japan
2. then look for search term 'outlook', in the filtered out data from step 1
On side note:
with in search box,
+ [Tab space] can't be typed, but can be pasted
+ comma[
,] would be considered as a char; can't be used as delimiter
