Tvmama

1 Comment Written by Atila on August 29, 2008 – 10:48 am

You can use the filter settings in Google Analytics to prevent your own internal or network traffic from appearing in your reports. This feature is useful because you likely will browse your own Web site on a regular basis to check for broken links, broken images, typos, and so on.

Also, you likely will set your Web site as your default home page. All these browsing habits can lead to inaccurate data in your Analytics reports. When looking at your reports in Google Analytics, be sure to have your information as accurate as possible because you will use this information to make informed decisions about many aspects of your Web site including design, content, and conversion goal funnels. Including your personal browsing data skews your reporting, which could possibly lead you to incorrect assumptions about your site, so you want to exclude it from your analytics reporting.

To ensure your reports are accurate, you should always filter out your own internal traffic on your Web site. You can accomplish this by filtering out your IP address from the data that Google Analytics collects. Applying this filter is a very straightforward process, and is effective immediately.

You may also want to exclude an IP range if more than one person from one network works on a site. In this case, adding an exclude filter to the range is much more efficient than blocking each IP address individually. Once a network filter is correctly put in place, Google Analytics filters out all your internal network traffic before displaying your reports.

When adding an IP address or an IP range to your filters, use regular expressions. Regular expressions are commonly used when performing textual data manipulation tasks. In Step 6, you were directed to escape any periods with a forward slash — this is an example of a regular expression.

When using an exclude filter, which is used when excluding an IP address or range, Google Analytics excludes the visitor data only if the information from the regular expression matches the data in the corresponding field. Fields may include the IP address, visitor location, screen resolution, and language settings, among others. For basic filters, use of regular expressions is fairly limited. Note that Google Analytics also offers good examples to work off of when you are going through the basic filter addition process.

If one filter is going to be common to several Web site profiles, you do not need to remake each filter. You can simply create the filter once, and then add the additional Web sites through the Filter Manager. This can be accessed through the initial Analytics Settings page, through the Filter Manager link in the bottom-right section of the page. Simply click Edit next to the appropriate filter, add the desired domains, and save your changes.