Google Analytics Filter: Force URI Case to Lowercase

Prevent Duplicate Line Items in Google Analytics Due to Mixed Case URLs with the Force Lowercase Google Analytics Filter

Google Analytics by default captures data just as it appears in a visitors browser. This being so, you can have two or more URLs that are the same but appear as separate entries due to different cases in the URLs, both lowercase and uppercase.

For Example:

• /coffee/flavorA/index.html
• /coffee/flavorA/INDEX.HTML

Although both will take you to the same page if you were to put them into your browser, Google Analytics will create separate line entries for each one leaving you to have to merge the two to get to the complete data for that URL. Imagine the pain if you had 100s, 1000s or more pages on your website with multiple line entries for the same URL.

However, Google Analytics allows you to apply a Custom Filter to remedy this problem. You can associate this filter on a profile by profile basis in case you have certain profiles that you do not want this applied to. One thing worth noting is that this won’t “fix” past data already in your reports, but anything going forward it will put into one line entry (either lowercase or uppercase depending on how you setup the Custom Filter.

Here are the easy steps to create the custom filter that will force the Request URI to lowercase or uppercase:

1. Add a new filter to your profile and use the following values:
2. Filter Name: Name Your Filter
3. Filter Type: Custom filter
4. Select “Lowercase” (or “Uppercase” if you want to force the URLs to Uppercase)
5. Filter Field: Request URI
6. Select which websites you want to apply the filter too and select Add
7. Save Changes

Here is a screenshot of how it will look:

Related posts:

1. Using Goals in Google Analytics to Track Conversions A simple and free way to track a conversion on...
2. Tracking & Separating Subdomain Data under One Profile Using Filters in Google Analytics If you have one Google Analytics profile tracking multiple subdomains...
3. Using IP Filtering in Google Analytics – The Basics If you are using the free Google Analytics software (or...
4. Google Analytics App for the iPhone – A Quick Review The best Google Analytics App available for the iPhone right...
5. Advanced Segmentation to be Included into Google Analytics. Google this past week announced some new enterprise features to...