Improve Analytics by Excluding Internal Traffic

Google Analytics can be a powerful tool to help you and your organization make informed decisions when managing, updating, and enhancing your website.

Internal traffic to your website from you and your team can distort the reports in Analytics and give you inaccurate data. To help solve this, we can implement internal traffic filters in Google Analytics to exclude this data from reporting.

How Else Is This Useful?

We regularly use a website accessibility tool called Monsido. This tool will be configured to scan your website regularly, and by doing so, you will see a large spike in traffic to your website. This data can and should be excluded from Analytics because it provides no value or insight into our end users.

Implementing the Filter:

For accurate steps and guidance on implementing Internal Traffic Filters, review the documentation created by Google. Here is a link to a resource from Google.

Need Help Getting Started?

1. Contact an expert today and we can help you configure your Google Analytics account.
2. Check out a video guide we created on how to implement IP Filters in Google Analytics.

Things to Consider:

1. Internal Traffic Filters will prevent data from being saved in Analytics. Poorly implemented filters could exclude relevant data.
2. Google notes that Internal Traffic Filters can take 24-36 hours to take effect.
3. Implementing these filters is based on a user's IP address.
   1. If your IP address is not static or constant, you may not be able to filter out some data reliably.
   2. In today’s digital landscape, it’s not uncommon for users to bounce between multiple IP addresses. When in the office, home, and mobile, you can have multiple IP addresses that you may want to consider to filter out.
4. Getting your public IP address is easy, and there are many ways to do it. If you need to get IP addresses from users, ask them to visit https://ipchicken.com, it’s one of my favorite ways to get an IP address. 

Alternative Method: Report Filters

Implementing an Internal Filter as described above will prevent data from being saved to your account. Removing the filter will not add the data back in.

Google has documentation outlining how to utilize Report Filters to exclude/filter the data from your reports. Read the documentation provided by Google. When testing this method, I didn’t see a way to apply IP address-based filters.  You could consider implementing Tag Manager to define and attach a data-layer variable to all events. Filtering out by that property would be pretty easy then.

Image Credit: Adobe Firefly