Set Up Google Analytics IP Filter to Exclude Internal Traffic
The following tip was contributed by Chelsea Blacker.
Google Analytics accounts for all visitors to a site, and it’s important to catch accurate data by excluding visitors who don’t count. Visitors who “don’t count” may include:
- marketers & developers working on the site
- visitors who work at the company/organization the website is promoting
First, look up your IP address using an IP lookup tool. http://ip-lookup.net/
Next, access analytics and click on Analytics Settings in the upper right hand corner.
Scroll below all website profiles and select filter manager:
Finally, select “exclude all traffic from an IP address” and add the IP address(es) you wish to exclude. Voila, you’ll have a more accurate read of traffic to your website!
You can also use filters to exclude traffic that enters through a certain domain, ensure an analytics report only focuses on traffic to a certain subdirectory, and many more fancy custom filters.
Ann Smarty
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34 Responses to “Set Up Google Analytics IP Filter to Exclude Internal Traffic”
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Hehe, what are those funny tips
At first when I joined twitter I started to follow the “big” SEO names with the idea that I can learn something, how wrong I’ve been. Every SEO expert repeats the same shitty tips all day long. I’m not saying this tip is not useful but is so logical that anyone can come up with the idea. Even in sphinn I very very rarely see a useful tip, its only blah blah, take the money of another fortune 500 company for nothing. Why don’t you go to the google webmaster help forum and give tips there? Or maybe in the webmasterworld? I’ve asked 2 questions so far and noone was able to answer them but when it comes to basic like IP filter, good titles, use meta, everyone is an expert. @dailyseotip was the last SEO twitter user I continued to follow but enough. You better start giving real advice. Here’s one for you, convince me that you know SEO: In google.com, .co.uk, .es, .pl, .fr, etc searched in English, I’m on 2-4 page for 2 of the most popular phrases. At the same time on google.de seached again in english I’m in the middle of 1st page for the same phrases. Why is that? (the site IP is not german, 90% of the links are from english sites, UK provides the biggest part of the visitors). Ideas? Questions?
Ann Smarty Reply:
July 30th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
The phrase?
Also, which tool are you using to see the rankings? Google itself? If yes, where are you located?
Dipali Reply:
August 1st, 2009 at 5:23 am
There is nothing like that you’ll get nothing after following big SEOs. i am also following big seo but believe me i am getting awesome knowledge from them. and as per your questions i think google is delivering results based on IP address of query fired.
Try to search in google.com from Proxy sites and search in google.com through normal browsing. you’ll get different results from same search query. still any question??
This is beautiful. I feel like all my analytics go straight to hell when there’s any new content created on my sites because the developers load the pages so many times.
Thank you so much for this tip.
Nice tip, this can effect things like browser type and screen resolution and really skew your perspective of visitor characteristics.
Can I ask a question totally off-topic please? Is there a service to monitor a web site and alert if the site goes down, off-line?
Adam Carson Reply:
July 31st, 2009 at 7:58 pm
There are a number of monitoring services out there, I’ve used Hyperspin for some sites and it seems to work well.
It’s an obvious tip but we so often forget the obvious. Thanks for the reminder. I must now go off and DO IT.
set an external links with the url of your site and you will get
a faster SEO process:
Hey! I was looking for this thing, Infact I am new for this world but i am learning fast and was thinking that how could i figure out the visitors to my Blog accurately. Here i found your tip and I think this is the one I was searching for!
Regards for you!!!!
This is actually very important so companies don’t get data sets wrong and make adjustments due to internal traffic.
Once again Ann, thanks! I’ve always blocked my IP in statcounter, but didn’t know how to do it in Google Analytics. I always hated the fact that I was artificially increasing my clients’ stats. Now that I’m not – I don’t have to explain it to them anymore!
Excellent points, people should always do this unless they are trying to inflate website traffic to make themselves look better. :- ) lol just kidding
Always a handy tip to make sure you don’t skew your own analytics stats. I also like how you can use regular expressions to match ranges of IP addresses if needed.
Hi Ann,
I am aware of this already, but how could i exclude the traffic if i am set with an internal (local) IP address. Can i give the same IP address in the exclusion field, if so how google identifies this is the right IP address, because there might be so many number of same kind (local IP’s) can be seen in various corporates.
Thanks Ann and Chelsea! Now to explain to clients why their traffic figures have dropped a little!
It’s really cool function of Google analytics Ip filter for count accurate visits of website. Thanks for information.
Google Analytics is really an effective tool to get total data of a website. It really helps you to improve website. This function seems to be good. Will surely check it on my tool. Thanks
I just added this filter recently and am glad I did. I created two filters, one for home and work. The stats are too misleading if you are including your own visits.
Wow… great Tips ann… Thanks so much!
I’ll set up ip filter in my analytics account and see accurate visits. Thanks for information.
Thanks so much for the tip! I hate having skewed results when I test the hell out of my website.
Well I found it useful, and is the first page in google to show how it is actually done. Thanks
Thanks, I set up the IP exclusion in google analytics. I hope my IP doesn’t change. Also the information at ip-lookup was helpful.
I set up two analytics filters to exclude two ranges of ip addresses. Then I went back and looked at my traffic data, and the numbers are the same — yet that would be impossible.
How do you know if the ip exclude filters are actually working? Google says for privacy reasons they do not display IP addresses in any of the analytics reports.
Should the traffic data in the report change immediately upon saving the filters, or do I have to wait for any new data collected going forward from the day I created the filters?
climberbird Reply:
February 18th, 2010 at 3:06 pm
I have noticed that IP filters do not work. I have two exclusions set up in Google Analytics, both of which are IP address from which I update my website. I use wordpress and preview each of my posts before actually taking it live. In my Google Analytics reports, I see the page request for &preview=true in my reports. If IP filtering were working properly, should I not see these page requests?
Ken Reply:
February 22nd, 2010 at 4:23 pm
The two filters must be combined into one using the OR ‘|’ sign because multiple filters are AND’ed and the filter will fail since the address can’t be from two IP addresses simultaneously.
Make sure you have a ‘catch all’ profile so you can compare unfiltered data with filtered and be able to see the difference between the two.
This is really a dumb question, but here goes. Does ‘exclude’ work for only the first page view of a session? If I want to exclude traffic from mydomain.com, once I originate the session, page two now originates from mydomain.com and won’t it now be excluded?
If you add a filter does it take immediate affect? I keep trying to add a filter to remove my ip from the visitor reports but it is making no change.
Dan Reply:
May 25th, 2010 at 4:05 pm
According to the Google Analytics FAQ:
“When a filter is created in your profile, it is immediately applied to new data coming into your account. It will not affect historical data, nor are we able to reprocess your old data through the new filter.”
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55548
Steven Roennfeldt Reply:
May 25th, 2010 at 9:03 pm
Thanks for looking into that for me…great help, I have noticed since that my numbers don’t seem to be affected by my frequent updates.
Can it applied to already collected data? i don think so.
Is there any other way to apply filter to existing data to remove visits from certain IP range?
Thanks
I have a ipv6 adress. How do I filter those?
the only thing which I may suggest is running another ip lookup with a tool like http://ip-address-lookup-v4.com/ i’ve had some intermittent problems with ip-lookup.net where their RIPE info wasn’t updated so the results were inaccurate