Some of the best filters I’ve seen used have to do with either search query data (a la SEMvironment’s NUDE keyword’s filter) or grouping particular geo-location data together. If you manage a large website with many sub-directories the, the “Directory” filter can prove useful to manage data in a much more segmented fashion.

http://doteduguru.com/id629-google-analytics-filters.html
http://www.semvironment.com/nude-adwords-keyword-data-exposed-with-google-analytics/
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=73983&ctx=sibling

To see AdWords search queries in Google Analytics, you can use these instructions:

http://www.semvironment.com/nude-adwords-keyword-data-exposed-with-google-analytics/

To see MSN or Yahoo search queries in Analytics, you need to append your PPC traffic from those engines with URL tags. Here is the instruction for that:

http://www.ppchero.com/the-secret-of-tracking-yahoo-keyword-data-in-google-analytics/
http://www.ppchero.com/learn-how-to-track-your-msn-adcenter-ppc-keyword-data-in-analytics/

You will need to configure Analytics to recognize the following parameters:
MSN – QueryString
Yahoo – OVRAW

Let me know if you have any questions!

We are currently running Google Analytics and recently we have tried out Hit Tail at the same time.

What software would you recommend that we install in order to get the search query and how do we tie it up with the broad match keywords that we used, so that we can get a proper negative list of PPC words.

Your help would be greatly appreciated

Goran

I don’t have any great advice for you concerning Omniture. The only clients we deal with who have Omniture are also using SearchCenter. However, I’m sure that there are ways to create unique tracking URLs that will pass information to Omniture. Using the insertion tags listed in this blog post, combined with identifiers that Omniture recognizes (i.e. “source” or “medium”), you should be able to populate your AdWords data quite simply. And for Yahoo/MSN, you can use these instructions for getting that data in much the same way:

http://www.ppchero.com/the-secret-of-tracking-yahoo-keyword-data-in-google-analytics/
http://www.ppchero.com/learn-how-to-track-your-msn-adcenter-ppc-keyword-data-in-analytics/

@Jamie,

For the majority of search traffic, Google appends the referral URL with loads of data – including the search query. However, I don’t know of a way to easily get this data from Google. Yahoo and MSN are a cinch! (i.e. OVRAW or QueryString, respectively) Depending on your Analytics software, you could potentially configure your software to recognize that portion of the referral URL and capture the search query for reporting (Google lists this as “q=”). Another option would be to configure your website to automatically capture that data and load it into an easily readable database file. Here are a couple of resources:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/ppc/3504906.htm
http://www.zend.com//code/codex.php?ozid=872&single=1

Let me know if you have any other questions!

I know it is possible by checking the referrer then exploding the URL – but does Google offer this as a feature?