Anywhere you are shown popular data (except the dashboard – coming soon!), you now also have the option of filtering that down so you can quickly find items you are looking for. It’s been on my list for a while but I guess I didn’t realize quite how useful this type of filtering would be until I was actually able to use it on my own data. So how useful is that? Very. Here’s what it looks like (top right corner in red):
So anything you type in this box, the list will be narrowed down to only items that contain exactly what you typed in, whether that match is the whole string, or just the start, middle, or end of it. If the data you are viewing is “content” related, which means there is both a name and a URL, then the filter is applied to both the name and the URL.
We also support “negative” filters, which can be even more useful if you use them right. To do a negative filter, just a put an exclamation point in front of it, for example, “!bad filter”. A negative filter means that only items that do NOT match the filter will get through.
Looking back at that first screenshot, you can see our top 5 searches for today all have the word “clicky” in them. Well, I want to find the most popular searches that DON’T have the word “clicky” in them, because these will generally be people who were not looking for us in particular, but just something in general. It’s important to monitor this type of data so you can optimize based on it. So I just type is “!clicky” in the filter box, and here’s what we have:
As another example, people obviously come to Clicky to view their data, and all of these pages are in the “/stats/” sub-directory. So other than our few VERY high traffic pages (front page, login, and user home page), basically all our popular pages are always individuals looking at their stats. What if I would like to know what our most popular content is, OTHER THAN people viewing their stats? Before, I was SOL 🙁 But now, I am not! I can just type in “!/stats” to the filter box, and all those pages are removed from the results. Now I only see the popular content outside of the stats directory!
Another unexpected benefit from this is you can use the filters to narrow down your most popular cities based on country or state, which can be really useful to learn more about visitors in a certain locale. We’ve had a lot of requests from users in the US to add a “popular states”, or be able to filter down visitors based on state. We plan to add both of these in the future, but in the meantime, there’s something new you can do. If you look at your popular cities, you will see that the country is included in the name, and so is the two-letter abbreviated state name for US cities. So if you wanted to just view the most popular cities in Oregon for example, you could do type in “OR, USA” and you get this:
Or if you run an Oregon centric site, and want to see where you get the most traffic from other than your target market, you specifiy NOT Oregon with “!OR, USA”:
To top it all off, all of this can be used with the stats API as well, although it has not been added to the docs yet. Since everything is built on the same core, any new features the site gets like this, the API gets automatically – that’s always nice. For you programmers out there, when you apply this filter in our web interface, you will see the GET parameter is named “filter”. Just pass in that same parameter to the API with your request. For example, here is an API call to get Clicky’s most popular searches from the last 30 days that don’t contain the word “clicky”.
As usual I’ve written a novel and I’m sorry. I just like to give examples and cover everything in detail so you can understand how it all works and take advantage of it. Hope you like it!
