How to Filter IP Addresses from Google Analytics to get a True Traffic Count
How to Filter IP Addresses from Google Analytics to get a True Traffic Count
- Our client has a large office with dozens of people using multiple IP addresses to visit their site daily. We need to filter out all that noise since I understand it can skew data considerably. Is there a relatively easy process to doing this in Google Analytics? What do we need to do?
Answer: Good question! As you correctly stated above, allowing this kind of in-house traffic to be counted in your Google Analytics (GA) can horribly skew your data and mess with any goals or conversions you've already set-up.
As anyone who has ever gone through a site design, installed a new plugin, or gone through internally and physically evaluated content or click paths can tell you, this can result in a lot of traffic (over a finite time).
That traffic in turn can cause havoc with your various site metrics. Metrics like time-on-site, average bounce rate, or average sessions per user can all be thrown off and in many instances, significantly.
Fortunately, the solution for this is pretty simple: adding an IP address filter to your GA will allow you to exclude your own range of IP addresses. The process is relatively simple.
Here's a step-by-step tutorial to do just this:
- Open Google and do a search for what is my IP and copy the IP address Google shows at the top of the results page. ...