Using The Internal IP Address Filter to Block Yourself From Analytics Data

Google Analytics is often used to track external traffic and how customers are interacting with various elements of your website. From a business standpoint, however, having your employees generating hits when browsing your site can be problematic when analyzing areas of opportunity to improve the sales funnel and points of customer conversion. Luckily there’s an easy way to block yourself from Analytics data, which I’ll explore in this post.

Create an IP address filter

Creating an IP address filter is simple when trying to prevent internal traffic from influencing your GA data reports. In my previous post I explored creating a filter to remove spam traffic and those steps are similar when creating a filter for your IP address.

1. To create an IP filter, you will first create a new filter for your view by clicking the “Admin” Settings.
2. In the account column, click “All Filters” and proceed to click “ +New Filter.”
3. Select Create New Filter and enter a name for that filter.
4. Out of the predefined filter types, select “Predefined Filter.”
5. From the Select filter drop-down menu, select “Exclude” and click the “Select source or destination” drop-down menu to find the “traffic from IP addresses” option.

Click the Select expression drop-down menu with the expression “Equal To”. After this, enter your IP address. If you aren’t sure what your IP address is, you can Google “What is my IP address” and it will be the first search result.

Things to Note When Creating an IP Address Filter

Like I mentioned in my previous post, creating a filter won’t remove any data that has been processed by Google Analytics. It will only begin filtering out hits from internal traffic after the filter has been added.

You also want to make sure that you have your original data for reference in case the filter isn’t working properly so your data isn’t skewed. The filter may take 24 hours to take effect, so be sure to check back in and make sure it’s working properly after 24 hours.

If you want to look at a side-by-side comparison of your internal traffic, you can create a new view for that filter in the “View Settings” and applying a “pre-existing filter.”

When comparing your overall traffic, you can also create a “Custom Segment” in the “Audience Overview” tab by following the following steps:

1. In your Audience Reporting View, click on “Add Segment” and select “New Segment.” You can name this new segment “No Spam” or “Referral Spam.”
2. Select Advanced Conditions on the left side of the segment options.
3. Select “Sessions” and “Exclude” in your filter options.
4. Select “Source” and “Exactly Matches To”.
5. In the box next to “Exactly Matches To,” copy and paste your IP address.
6. Save this segment.

Browser Extensions For Excluding Yourself from Site Data

If you don’t want to take the time to set up filters in Google Analytics or you’re using a VPN to connect to the internet, there are various browser extensions available to use.

While there are extensions available to block the GA javascript on all websites like Google Analytics Opt-Out Add-On, if you want to exclude yourself from only your own site data I recommend using “Block Yourself From Analytics.”

It’s simple to use in that you only click a button once you’re on the website you want to exclude your data from.

Creating an Internal Filter Recap

I hope that you found this post to be helpful in filtering out your internal traffic from your Google Analytics Data! If you haven’t already, be sure to check out my other GA post on setting benchmarks to compare your site performance to the competition.