How to exclude internal traffic from Google Analytics

Memo to all marketers: remove staff visits from your website traffic!

The heaviest users of a website tend to be people from within your own organisation. So it makes sense to remove these people from your Google Analytics traffic otherwise your visitor figures will be artificially inflated by internal use.

This is the really short version of what to do. For a more detailed explanation read my original blog post here.

Find your public IP address

Visit www.whatsmyip.org and make a note of the large number shown at the top of the page. If you have multiple office locations then someone will need to do this at each location otherwise you will not be excluding all your internal traffic.

How to exclude a single IP address in Google Analytics

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account and click on the Admin link shown at the top of the page.
2. Click on Filters shown in the right column.
3. Click the red +NEW FILTER button.
4. Give the filter a name, for example the office location.
5. From the dropdown lists select [Exclude] and [traffic from the IP addresses] and [that are equal to].
6. Enter your IP address in the four boxes displayed below, making sure to separate the four parts of the number separately – note the boxes have a decimal between them just like your IP address.
7. Click the blue Save button.
8. Mission complete – pat yourself on the back!

If you have IP addresses for other office locations, repeat the process above for each. If all the IP addresses are sequential then follow the instructions in my original blog post to exclude an IP range.