Roll up Yahoo Mail, Hotmail referrals If you send marketing emails without campaign tagging or an external company e-mail your sites links to its users that have Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, users will arrive at your site via one of the many Yahoo or Hotmail servers. So searching for mail.live.com in your referral report gives you hundreds of referrers which are actually one and the same referral link. You tend to get referrals like above ( ”xy342w.mail.live.com”). You can roll these together so you can see hotmail referrals grouped together by making changes inside Google Analytics so that reports are clearer and easier to breakdown. Login to Google Analytics; select your profile you wish to roll up this data. Select Admin > Profiles > Filters

 

The next step is to create a New Filter. These Filter you need to create will be a custom filter that will look at campaign sources and replace/rename the string with something that rolls them up into an easy to view source. Filter type: Custom Filter > Search and Replace The filter field that will be searched will be the Campaign Source and in order to ensure that all possible variables of the email source are collected a regular expression will be needed. Filter Field > Campaign Source Search String > “A Regular Expression” sn144w.snt113.mail.live.com will need the following regular expression ^.*mail\.live\.co.$ Replace String with the name you wish to roll it to. I have chosen livemail. Select Save. Example below. Windows Hotmail/Livemail:  

 

This is a guest post contributed by James Cornwall

About James Cornwall

As Digital Analyst at 4Ps Marketing, James is responsible for the recently launched analytics department. After studying Civil Engineering at CITY University, James has undertaken a career in ecommerce and digital marketing. He is Google Adwords and Analytics Certified, and in his spare time is a keen hockey player. Ask James a Question: Follow on Twitter – @jamesc_4ps LinkedIn – http://uk.linkedin.com/in/ james-cornwall/