One of the nice features of Google Analytics is the ability to filter certain information from the results. For instance you can filter all traffic from Slashdot so you don’t have to see in your analytics reports that boring old Slashdot effect over and over again. You don’t have that problem? Well, how about filtering yourself out of your traffic? That is a good first step. If you are a site obsessed loser like me you will find yourself visiting your own site multiple times throughout the day hoping that someone has commented or that, well I am not sure what, but you visit your site too much and it is starting to become a drain on your love life. Filter that traffic if you think you are man enough to handle the subsequent dip in the numbers. And now without further ado, here’s how:
- In Google Analytics settings page click on the Filter Manager in the lower right corner.
- Click the “Add a Filter” link on this page.
- Give your filter a name. If you are like me you want a tough sounding name like “Chuck Norris Filter” or something like that.
- From the pull-down menu select “Exclude all traffic from an IP address”.
- Then enter your IP address in the box.
- Coolness of coolnesses Google Analytics supports regular expressions so make sure to use escape characters for all the dots like so, 10\.10\.100\.212
- Then select the web site to be filtered from the list of available profiles and click “Save Changes”.
- Congratulations! You are now being more honest with yourself about your web analytics.
- Next log in constantly to Google Analytics to see the latest reports confident in the knowledge that the traffic you see is pure internet traffic, not you reloading the page 150 times so you can get some advertisers.
4 Comments
That’s a useful tip. I don’t actually use Google Analytics as I don’t want the company that handles PPC to be tracking results (for me or my clients). Plus, I need a third party to measure clickfraud. I use my own, ugly unix shell scripts to parse the log files, so I “grep -v $myIPaddress” or “grep -v $myUserAgent” to filter my own clicks.
BTW, did you try the Technorati Tracker demo? Since you specialize in web analytics, I’m curious to see if you think it could be useful. Or, would you simply set up some sort of Technorati filter in Google Analytics if you wanted to isolate Technorati hits (and bot visits)?
Don’t get me wrong Rich. I like to tear apart a log file with the best of them, and I only use Google Analytics for my personal sites not for clients.
I did not try out the Technorati tracker. Obviously since GA is javascript based it won’t see Technoratibot visits so that is logfiles only. As fat as visitor referrals from technorati GA gives visibility into how many visits arrived via Technorati and you can drill into the data enough to see what page brought them. There are some other types of configurations you could use to follow visitor paths and what not, but since I am measuring a blog it is not too informative.
I use a tool called Fiddler (http://fiddlertool.com/). It is written by Eric Lawrence, an extremely bright engineer at Microsoft. It’s a proxy that runs on your Windows system that you can point IE (and Firefox) to. The most amazing thing about it is how you can customize it. If you want to know how to block your browsers from hitting your analytics tools using Fiddler, drop me a line.
Cheers, and thanks for the useful site!
-Eric
Eric,
Howdy. I have been reading your blog for a long time. I use Fiddler all the time, as well as IEWatch. Admittedly, I have never used the scripting capabilities you are speaking of. I look forward to dropping you a line about it. :)
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