Filtering Internal Traffic - Google Analytics Tip #4

Alright you have set up Google Analytics, but the key is to get the most accurate data possible. Excluding yourself and/or your company, or any one who is working with on or with your site is going to give you a more accurate picture of how your site is performing?

How do you know if you have already filtered internal traffic?

Well if your domain name is something like www.sellbluewidgetstoday.com/ and you have tons of direct traffic to your site, than odds are you have not filtered out internal traffic as not too many visitors are going to be coming from type in traffic.

How do you filter internal traffic from Google Analytics?

Well there are two ways to do this. The first, and broadest, way to filter internal traffic is by setting an exclude filter for your company?s IP address. This will filter out all traffic in Google Analytics from that specific IP address.

The second way, which is a bit more complicated, is to set up a custom user defined filter. There are two steps to setting up a custom user defined filter. The first step is to add a custom segment cookie to any and all computers that you wish to exclude from Google Analytics. This can be done by creating an HTML form that you upload to your server. All employees you want to filter out must then use this form. The second step is to create the custom user defined filter in Google Analytics. You can do this by navigating to the ?Filter Manager? section within Google Analytics and selecting add new filter. Then select a custom filter type in the drop down menu. Continue to set up as defined below. Make sure you use whatever you type in the "filter pattern" field below is the same field you use in your form.