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Get Better Traffic Reports with Google Analytic Filters

Traffic reports are an essential tool if you have a Web site or if you're running an online marketing campaign. Tools like Google Analytics give great insight into how people found your site and their behavior once they get there.

However, if you spend time on your own site you may be skewing the reports which reduces their effectiveness. Luckily, Google Analytics gives us filters so that we can, well, filter out internal traffic. In the Google Analytics Filter video below I walk you through how to create filters that will block your own activity at your site.

To find your own IP address check out the aptly-named WhatIsMyIPAddress.com.

If you want to filter your own traffic and you have a range of static IP addresses, or you have a dynamic IP address you have a little more work ahead of you. Google Analytic's help section has loads of information on that, but here's the quick start guide:

For Ranges:


Range: 176.168.1.1-25 and 10.0.0.1-14
IP address value : ^176\.168\.1\.([1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-5])$|^10\.0\.0\.([1-9]|1[0-4])$

For help finding the correct expression for your range of IP addresses, use our tool:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55572

For Dynamic IPs:

How to exclude traffic by cookie:

1. Create a new page on your domain, containing the following code:

  <body onLoad="javascript:pageTracker._setVar('test_value');">

(Please note that this code is in addition to the Google Analytics tracking code that you have on every page of your website.)

2. In order to set the cookie, visit your newly created page from all
computers that you would like to exclude from your reports.

3. Create an Exclude filter to remove data from visitors with this cookie. Follow these instructions http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55494
to create a filter with the following settings:

Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: test_value
Case Sensitive: No

Want more Google Analytics goodness? Check out these other videos and don't forget to subscribe to our blog!

Rich Brooks
Your Web Site Analyst

Flyte Toolbox - E-Junkie

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 9:41 am and is filed under Analytics, How-To Web Marketing Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Get Better Traffic Reports with Google Analytic Filters”

  1. krishna says:
    February 12, 2009 at 5:07 am

    Its important for us to understand the regular expressions while excluding a range of IP's from the list. However nice video here

  2. my ip says:
    July 7, 2009 at 4:14 am

    Good post,

    I'll try today this trick.

    Thanks

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