Ever since Blogger started to redirecting users to different ccTLD based on visitor’s location. It’s making analytic data filled unnecessary geographic location indication in the Hostname and Referral link. The visitor’s location has already been covered by Google Analytics. The multiple-ccTLD is just splitting entries unnecessarily and madly.

I don’t actually care about that, because I now read less and less the report, but I am sure some of you may want to merge all the entries back like before, that is only blogspot.com.

1   2 Types of unnecessary

1.1   Hostname

For blogs which do not have custom domain, that is <blogname>.blogspot.com, the data in your Google Analytics would have included some ccTLD hostnames, though you don’t usually read those in reports.

If your blog has custom domain, then the hostname should always be the same.

1.2   Referral

Even you have custom domain, the referrer is possible to be another Blogger blog and that’s the chance which is accessed via the ccTLD domains of Blogger. So, it is unavoidable that some entries being split into different ccTLD.

2   Filters

To merge them back into just one, simply add two filters as shown below:

NameTypeFieldPattern (From / To)
HostnameSearch and ReplaceHostnameblogspot\.[^/]+
Customblogspot.com
ReferralSearch and ReplaceCampaign Sourceblogspot\.[^/]+
Customblogspot.com

Important note: It is Campaign Source as the filter field not Referral for Referral filter. The Referral is generated from data, so it never gets back to the database. Modification to Referral field wouldn’t be saved. I was wondering why my filter didn’t work, I finally got a hint from About Traffic Sources. Still, very unclear.

3   About ccTLD use

I really dislike how Google and its companies use ccTLD. Google search, YouTube, Blogger, and probably even more, they all have used ccTLD or country-code-attached hostname in similar way.

And it’s mostly useless for analysis report because it doesn’t provide any additional data. For example, you can view different CC YouTube, but still using other language. I sometimes gets different CC referrers in my report—and it can be via someone shares a CC link, and those CC doesn’t add any values to the report but only distractions.

This CC URL is very annoying to me whenever I see someone post a link or link in their blogs. They don’t bother to change the CC back to .com, but why should they? You must understand that Blogger uses blogspot.com as canonical URL (for non-custom-domain blogs) and seeing non-.com irritates me somehow.

And think about it, there are tons of ccTLD. With shortening URL, everyone shortens one ccTLD of basically the same thing. That’s a lot of waste.