Google Analytics: Exclude Your Internal Traffic

Google Analytics is a set of web-based analytical tools used by most website owners to help them understand things like where their users are coming from, how they are interacting with the site, and more. This data roadmap can help a site-owner make changes and improve their website, which could be the difference between a site being successful or not.

The more accurate the data, the more valuable it becomes.

Internal traffic (when you or your employees visit the site) alters your data picture. It’s not helpful to see how many times you or your employees visit the site, yet by default it is mixed-in with the data from outside traffic.

Excluding your internal website traffic is easy and it will make your Google Analytics data more accurate and valuable.

This is based upon your IP address, so you should think about excluding home and work (if different). If your employees and/or authors work at various places, you should look at excluding them as well.

What is your IP?

Simply Google “What is my IP.”

Creating a filter in Google Analytics

Step 1: Log into Google Analytics and click on “Account”. It should be on the bottom left.

Step 2: Under Account click on “All Filters” and “ADD FILTER” to create a new filter.

Step 3: Name the filter.

Step 4: Select “Predefined”, “Exclude” and “traffic per IP addresses.”

You’re done!

Extra credit: Setting up a new view for this

Before you start setting up filters, it might be a good idea to create a separate view and keep the main one that is intact and non-filtered. This is what I normally do.  

What is a view? 

Views are an incredibly powerful tool that allows you to separate your picture of data. One view could be focused on conversions. Perhaps a focus on a geographical location. There are endless uses for them and they can quickly organize your data into key areas and components.  

This can get incredibly advanced, but let’s keep this simple per this article. Without creating any filters yet, I am going to create a view specifically for filtering out IP addresses. 

Creating a view

While still in the Account section under the “View” column, press the “Create View” button. Then, name and save it.

Now you have a new view!

How do we apply this?

Easy. Click “All Filters” again. Then just select the view and add it to the filter. Save and that’s it. 

How to view

Now that you have a new view, it’s simple to view it. Just select the drop-down at the top and select the view!

Conclusion

Google Analytics is incredibly powerful. It gets a lot more powerful once you start filtering data and knowing what to look for. Instead of doing what most people do and look at their data as a whole, filter the data that is important to you. Think to yourself, you already know that you had 1,000 total visits last month. Imagine knowing that 700 visits actually mattered.