Google Analytics is a great package that allows you to track visitors to your website. The problem is that if you or your employees visit your website frequently, you are not seeing an accurate representation of your true visitor numbers.
You might not think that there can be many of these internal visits to your website, but you might be surprised, particularly if you have a large number of employees. Another source of internal visits to your website are website developers. We may visit a client’s website multiple times a day for various reasons, all of which can totally skew their metrics.
How do we stop tracking our own visits?
What you are essentially going to do is to create a filter that excludes your IP address (or your developers’) from the total number of visitors to your website. It’s not as difficult as it sounds, but first you need to know your IP address and if you don’t already know what it is, you can find out your IP address here.
Next, you need to know if your IP address is static or dynamic, because if it changes all the time then you can’t track it. If you don’t already know this information then you can contact your provider for this information and if you do have a dynamic IP, ask them to change it to static.
Alternatively, you can follow these instructions to see if your IP is dynamic or static:
- Click on the Windows START button, click on RUN and type in ‘cmd’.
- Type ‘ipconfig/all’ into the command prompt and press ENTER.
- Look for DHCP ENABLED and if this is set to NO then you have a static IP address, if it is YES, then contact your provider to change it to static.
Once you know you have a static IP address, follow these steps:
- In the ADMIN area of Google Analytics, go to VIEWS and click on CREATE NEW VIEW.
- Give this new view a name, such as ‘exclude internal visits’ and click CREATE VIEW.
- Select FILTERS, NEW FILTERS and then give this filter a name, such as ‘exclude internal visits’ or ‘exclude own IP’.
- Leave all of the boxes in their default state and then type in your IP address into the boxes.
- Click on SAVE.
That’s it. Google will no longer include your internal visits in their visitor metrics.
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