We all watch the Google Analytics data for our websites very closely to see just how many visitors we are getting, where are they coming from and what are they doing when they get to our site. One thing that many of our clients ask us is “how can I get rid of internal company traffic from my reports?” Obviously, internal staff logging on to the site is of no real interest to us in terms of analysing site traffic. There are two ways to exclude such traffic.

The first is to use the pre-defined exclude filter within the Analytics application. Just go to filter manager, add filter, pre-defined filters and you will see an option to exclude traffic from a range of IP addresses or a single IP. This is fine if working from a static IP. However, this is very often not the case and so this filter is not suitable.

When filtering internal traffic from a dynamic IP, the easiest thing to do is as follows. Add the Google Analytics user defined code snippet to a page on your website that only internal staff have access to. If such a page doesn’t exist, set one up or we can do for you. Once all staff have logged onto this page, a UTMV cookie will be placed on their machine identifying them as being internal staff. Now a filter can be set up to exlude all users defined as “internal staff.”

For more on how to get the very most out of your Google Analytics account or even to set one up for you, be sure to contact us.