So – you’ve installed Google Analytics on your site to track visitors – great! And you’re getting loads of hits – brilliant!

BUT! Have you thought about how many of those hits are you and your colleagues?!

Is your website set as the homepage in your browser? Do you regularly check your site to reference information, or to monitor updates your web designers have made?

If so, Google Analytics is logging all of these hits – and that’s CHEATING! What you really want Google Analytics to tell you is how many potential cutomers are genuinely finding your site, and how they’re using it.

“Can I exclude my own visits from Google Analytics results then?” I hear you ask!

Well – the good news is YES you can! You can use Filters in Google Analytics to exclude your own IP address from the results. Here’s how…

How to Use Filters to Exclude IP Addresses in Google Analytics

Log in to Google Analytics and navigate to the main dashboard. Hit the Analytics Settings button in the top left corner of the screen:

Now scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the Filter Manager link:

You’ll now be taken to the Filter Manager page, which has a list of existing filters (there won’t be any if you haven’t used this before)

Now click on the Add Filter button on the top-right corner of the filters list:

For the next part, you’re going to need to know what your IP address is. If you’re not the sort of geek who just knows these things by heart you’ll need to find out – so before we go any further, open a new browser window and go to http://www.ipchicken.com/

The IP Chicken will tell you what your IP address is! Make a note of it – it’ll look like this:

If you want to exclude the traffic from all of the computers in your office, you’ll need to check the IP addresses of them too. If you’re all on the same internet connection, they’re probably all the same – but worth checking!

If you work in an office with hundreds of workstations and multiple internet connections, ask your IT guys to give you a list of all the IP addresses being used.

NOTE! This method will only work if you have a static IP address – for variable IP addresses you need to use a different method which uses a cookie – described on Google’s site here

OK now back to your window with the Create New Filter page in Google Analytics – it’s a little form that looks like this (click on the image for a larger version):

Fill in the fields as follows:

Filter Name: Give the filter a name that describes what it does – e.g. “Exclude Office PCs” as in this example

Filter Type: Make sure “pre-defined filter” is selected, and that you’ve selected the “Exclude”, “Traffic from the IP addresses” and “that are equal to” options in the three drop down menus

IP address: Enter the IP address that the IP Chicken gave you!

In the Apply Filter to Website Profiles section, make sure that you’ve selected all of the Analytics profiles that you want the filter to apply to – do this by selecting them one by one and hitting “Add” until they all appear in the column on the right.

Now hit Save Changes and you’re done! No more cheating by counting your own visits in your Google Analytics stats!

You can learn more about all of the amazing data about your visitors you can get from Google Analytics on our Google Analytics Training and Advanced Google Analytics Training courses.

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