How to exclude internal website traffic in Google Analytics reports

Do you have a website and have registered your website under Google Analytics. Most of them who register with Google Analytics just look into the default setup that is present in Google Analytics and do not dig into understanding the reports. By default, these reports that are view-able under Analytics are your external and internal data when it comes to your website traffic.

It's important that you get the exact numbers. As a website owner you might login to your website multiple times to check the health and status of each of the post or updates that you make to your blog or website. But when you pull out website traffic reports using Google Analytics it will show both external as well as your own internal traffic.

In order to exclude internal website traffic that is created by website owners or employees within your company, Google Analytics has something called 'Filters' using which you can set the way you want the final reports to be. These filters provide a flexible way of modifying the data within each view. These filter can be used to exclude data, include data and change the way how the data looks in your reports. In Google Analytics there are two types of filters. One is pre-defined which is more like a template and is ready to use. And the second is custom, using which you can set conditions to get the report that you want.

I visit my own blog multiple times a day and don't want this traffic of my own to be displayed under the reports. To exclude this first login to your Analytics account and select the view. Now click on Filters and '+NewFilter'. Enter the filter name and select the type of filter. Now select the predefined filter, as this option is already available. Similarly you can select other filters. As shown in the image select the options and enter the IP address. If you do not want to consider traffic generated from employees working in your company then select 'that begin with' option and enter the first part of the IP address and click on save. Note that once a new filter is created, they are not applied retroactively to your data instead they are only applied from the moment you create them.

More details on Filter and some of the best practices: Coming Soon - Subscribe to my blog to get the latest updates.

This may not matter much if you are the only admin to the website, but will matter in medium to large organisation websites as there might be multiple admins and there might be many others within your organisation who is accessing (view access) the company website. All these will add to a large internal traffic and it's good not to include internal website traffic to get exact accurate reports. Note that its advised to create these filters in test view and not in the Master view.

More details on Views and important things to be followed while creating views: Coming Soon

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