Exclude visits from a dynamic IP with Google Analytics
Quite an important tip here to show you how to filter out and exclude data from a dynamic ip on Google Analytics. Most people will tend to visit their site to check blogs, forums or even during testing of new products etc. which can lead to an inaccurate number of visits to your site.
In order to stop this you would normally add a filter to Google Analytics for your ip (if it was static), but how would you go about doing this if you have a dynamic IP – which most every day broadband users will have?
Well, the solution lies in using a cookie as opposed to using IP addresses to filter out your computer. The idea behind this is to set a cookie and then use filtering system to look for the cookie and the filter out and ignore all data from the computer/s storing the cookie.
To set the cookie you need to create a new page on your domain with the following code:
<body onLoad=”javascript:__utmSetVar(’no_report’)”>
This code is in addition to the tracking code added at the bottom of all pages on the site. The next step would be to visit this site from any machine you want to exclude in order to set the cookie.
The last step is quite simply creating the filter that will look for the cookie and exclude the data. To do this, follow these steps:
- Click ‘Analytics Settings.’
- Click ‘Filter Manager.’
- Click ‘Add Filter.’ The Create New Filter page appears.
- Enter a Filter Name for this filter (maybe use ‘dynamic IP filter).
- From the Filter Type drop-down list, select Exclude.
- From the filter field select: User Defined
- From the filter pattern, select: no_report
- Make case sensitive: No
- Under the ‘Apply Filter to Website Profiles’ section, select the Available Website Profiles to which this filter will be applied.
- Click Add to move the selected profiles into the ‘Selected Website Profiles’ list.
- Click Finish to create this filter and start applying it to incoming data
The only bit left to do here is If you use multiple browsers, you will need to visit the newly created set cookie page from each browser you use as they all store cookies in different locations.
I hope this is useful!
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