Excluding Internal Traffic from your Data in Google Analytics
Whether updating content, or referencing information, accessing their company’s website is usually a regular occurrence for employees. It makes sense to remove this group of people from your Google Analytics data as they are not your target audience and have the potential to heavily skew the data of genuine visitors.
How can we recognise which visitors are internal users?
Google Analytics collects and stores information from every user that has visited your website. You can’t see any personal info, however, you can see their IP address. You can use this information to segment users. IP addresses can be dynamic and static. Most businesses have a static IP address which will not changed. This means if you can find your IP address, you can exclude data acquired by Google Analytics from this IP address.
How can I find my IP address?
This step is very simple! Assuming you are at your place of work, all you need to do is go to Google and type, ‘what is my IP address’, in the search bar. The first result will be you IP address. Now that we have our IP address, we can go back into Google Analytics.
How can I exclude my IP address in Google Analytics?
Once you are signed into your Google Analytics account, navigate to your admin settings. Next, click on filters on the right-hand side of the page. Here, you can view your current filters as well as add new ones. Add a new filter and give it a suitable name. Now under the ‘Filter Type’ settings, select the options ‘Exclude’, ‘traffic from the IP addresses’ and ‘that are equal to’. Now all you need to do is copy the IP address we found earlier on in Google into the box below entitled ‘IP address’. Job done!
If you have offices at numerous locations, you should repeat this process at all of your company’s offices.
Final Thoughts
It is worth noting that making these changes will not alter your historical data, it will only change the data collected by Google Analytics in the future. Furthermore, if you have employees that work from home or from dynamic locations, their data will still be collected.
You can expect to see a slight decrease in your traffic numbers following this change, however you can be safe in the knowledge that your data now truly reflects your visits from external visitors!
If you are looking for help with Google Analytics or your website, do get in touch!
By Joe Timms
Marketing & Data Analyst
