SPWD

I was recently reviewing the Google Analytics for the site here, and noticed that the traffic was rather high. Upon further investigation I found that many hits where coming from myself! Well, on a smaller traffic blog such as this, having very many “self” visits included might give one a false indication of traffic. Another area this might cause bloated traffic is if you have multiple users editing, viewing or otherwise interacting repeated on your site.

For me, I found this out after viewing the Maps portion of my analytics and seeing that my home state had the most traffic. I do promote a bit locally, so I investigated further. At that point I realized that the majority of visits were from myself – adding posts, previewing them, checking the site, checking changes etc. So, what is one to do? I filtered my IP from the analytics.

Now I can do this because I have a static IP. Don’t have that? Ask your ISP, most for a small charge will set it up for you and for small monthly charge let you keep it. This way, the static IP can be filtered from your analytics results and not impact the bottom line on your view of traffic.

To accomplish this filtering process, once logged into Google Analytics click on the Analytics Settings. Next, under the Actions column in the row of the site you wish to add the filter to, click edit. At this point, you want to find the Filter section, and choose Add New Filter. This will give you something like the image below, where you can choose from several options to filter from. You can choose to filter domains, IP addresses and more. The one you want to select is Exclude All Traffic From an IP Address.

It is important to note how the IP address is notated: 192\.168\.0\.1 – notice the backslash before the period. You can exclude a single IP address by including all four octets or you can exclude and entire range by including fewer octets: 192\.168\.0\. note that it ends with the \. this will exclude all hosts on the 192.168.0. network. So if you have multiple users in your company that view your site repeatedly with multiple IPs from the same network, you can effectively exclude all visits from staff this way.