Stop Polluting Your Data: How to Filter Out your own website traffic and Exclude Internal Traffic in Google Analytics

If you are running an e-commerce business then chances are you and your staff jump on the website on the regular basis, to add content, check prices, analyse s.e.o or perform basic day to day tasks.

The trouble is that these innocent visits to your website could be skewing your Analytics data.

These are some of the important metrics that are being diluted by your personal visits to the website

• Conversion Rate
• Visits
• Return Visitors Data
• Average time on site.

We want to be tracking the behaviour of your customers and potential customers… not your staff.

So how can we fix this?

By filtering our any traffic to the site from your business ip address we can remove your staff data from our tracking, so we only what happens when customers visit the website.

The great thing is this is easy to do and I am going to walk you through the steps on this blog.

Finding your IP Address.

I need you to do the following for me.

1. Open a web browser and type in “what is my ip”
2. Note down the number it says (should be something like 122.12.123.12)
3. Go to your router and turn it off at the wall for 10 seconds then turn it on again.
4. Once connected to the internet  Open a web browser and type in “what is my ip”
5. Note down the number.

If the numbers are the same you have a fixed IP address and you can use this to filter out any visits to the site from this computer.

You can perform this task on any computers used to access the website, this may also be helpful for your S.E.O or Web Development company, marketing staff and IT staff.

How to add the filter.

1. 1. Login to Google Analytics.
   2. Go to the website you want to add a filter to.
   3. Look for the  “admin option”.
   4. You should see 3 rows of data Account, Property, View <— you are looking for view.
   5. Click the filters option – Usually a good idea to set up an unfiltered view of all data and a master view that you use.
   6. Click on the new filter button to add your filter
   7. Filter Name – Give your filter a name like “Customer Service Computer”
   8. Filter Type – Under filter type select “traffic from the IP address” *this is not the default so you will have to select it.
   9. From ISP Domain – Pop your domain name in here
   10. Save.

You are done – you can repeat this process for any other computers you need to add.