Google Analytics Tip for this week. Use the filter tools to exclude traffic from certain IP addresses to your Analytics reports to get a better (and more realistic) picture of your web site’s traffic. Here are few key things to remember when doing this, and some basic Google Analytics set up instructions.
Filtering IP addresses can be a useful tool if you are working with a 3rd party web developement or internet marketing firms. You will want to filter out specific IP address, as chances are your internet vendors/partners may access your site often. In addition, you may want to filter out your own company’s IP address so you are not tracking internal visits to your site. If your staff is using your website as a sales tool, or every employee has your website set as their default home page in their web browser, this can skew your web’s traffic and visitors data.
REMEMBER: If you apply a filter to an account, the information that get’s filtered out of your Analytics web reports cannot be retrieved. Filters delete the filtered data. You will want to create a duplicate profile for your website in Analytics and leave one profile completely unfiltered to maintain all of your web stats in one profile, and then apply filters to additional profiles to segragate your information.
Under the Analytics Settings screen, once you have created your main profile, you can create a duplicate profile to apply your filters by clicking on “Add A Profile” and then entering the same domain setup information. (Your tracking code should already be installed if you have successfully created your main profile.) Tip: When you name the duplicate profile name it something that will help you easily distinguish what you are filtering. For example a profile with IP filtering might be “Profile Name – Filtered IPs”.
Once you’ve got your duplicate profile set up, you can now apply your filters. From your Analytics Setting screen, select the profile you want to filter, and click on “Edit”.
Click on “+ Add Filter” (shown below).
On the filter setup screen you’ll name your filter, and select “Exclude all traffic from an IP address” (shown below). If you need help finding your IP address, use http://iplocation.net.
I hope you find this information helpful. You might be suprised how much internal traffic is being logged for your site, giving you a false sense of a high traffic web site. Additionally, this IP filter will give you a much better sense of your top performing site pages, and your page specific bounce rates.
Good luck and happy web analyzing!
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I am going to start doing this from the start for every new account…hopefully!
I made the original account the filtered account, because that is the one that shows up when I open analytics. I can see stats on it immediately. It is the one I use all the time.
I made the additional profile the account that has no filters and called it:
RAW CompanyNameData
Nice job! Sue
Sue,
As long as you have created the duplicate profile with all data in tact BEFORE applying the filter to the original account then you are good to go!
Wendy
Another great article Wendy! So many clients that I’ve talked to in the past who think they have tons of great traffic only to find out that all this traffic was internal
It’s so important but so many people don’t understand the concept. I’m glad you talked about this because you nailed it right on the head!!
Great job! DM
It will be benficial to use the backslash regular expression character before the “.” character when inserting your IP address just likge Google shows you. This will ensure that the “.” is turned into a regular character.