Filter out traffic from your Google Analytics reports
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Written by Atila on September 1, 2008 – 9:42 am
You can filter out traffic from your Google Analytics reports by excluding all traffic from a particular domain. Excluding traffic from a particular domain does not exclude the referring site that sent you the traffic, but instead the Internet service provider (ISP) of the actual visitors.
You can use the Google Analytics domain filter to remove a company network from your reporting. For example, if you are the administrator of Google Analytics on your company’s blog, you may not want the traffic from your co-workers to show up in your reports because the number of people in your office visiting the company blog is not an accurate reflection of the actual growth of the blog. Including this type of data may skew important reporting data such as average time on-site and visitor loyalty.
Therefore, you may choose to filter out traffic coming from any network to which you may be connected. You must use caution when using the Google Analytics domain exclusion filter because you may end up excluding significant traffic sources from your analytics reports. For example, if you were to exclude all traffic from comcast.com, you would in effect be excluding the data from any of your visitors who have Comcast Internet service. This type of exclusion could have a very large effect on your reporting data, which may skew your numbers.
If you are going to exclude an ISP from your reports, you should create an additional profile before adding this filter. This ensures your ability to view statistics of your Web site with and without the domain exclusion filter in place. Keep in mind that filtering out an entire ISP can remove a valuable amount of data from your reports, and may lead to inaccurate analytics. Having separate accounts allows you to still retain that critical data.
Excluding an ISP is especially useful if your city is serviced by a small, local Internet service provider. Excluding your local ISP effectively removes all traffic from your family and friends that live in your area. This ensures that your data is as reliable as possible. In this situation, having multiple profiles displays the amount of local traffic you are receiving. Simply compare the data from the account with the local ISP filtered out to the account without the filter. The difference between these two equals the total amount of traffic you are receiving from your local ISP.
