How to Exclude Your Own Visits from Google Analytics
When you are examining your Google Analytics account details it is helpful to know what your visitors are doing on your site rather than how you are looking at your site when you are making changes. This is especially important with new websites with little traffic so far because you are skewing the results with your own behaviour rather than getting accurate information about how your visitors are actually using your website.
In your Google Analytics account there is an ability to filter out visits from a particular IP address. While there are other methods to exclude your visits, this is the easiest. It should be noted, if you have a WIFI that is accessible by customers while on your site, when they are on your site, if you are allowing them to access your WIFI and they are looking at inventory on your website while visiting your site, the site visits and user behaviour is excluded unless you have an open WIFI network on 1 IP address and your internal private network on another IP address. This is possible through configuration of your router and getting a second IP address from your internet provider. In many cases they will issue you 2 for free.
To simply use Google’s native solution for excluding your office or home IP address from your Google Analytics reports all you need to do is:
- login to your Google Analytics account
- click on the ADMIN tab
- under account click on ALL FILTERS
- click ADD FILTER
- add filter name – IE Office IP
- filter type – exclude
- source or destination – traffic from the IP addresses
- select expression – that are equal to
- IP address – enter your IP address – to find that out simply go to http:/whatismyip.com
- Apply Filter Views should automatically be set to All Website Data in Available. Click on that and then click ADD
- Click Save and you are done