How To Exclude Internal Traffic From Google Analytics

YouTube Transcript:

Firstly, let’s understand what is an IP address to see why we would want to remove it from Google Analytics.

According to Google, an IP address is “a unique string of characters that identifies each computer using the Internet Protocol to communicate over a network”.

Essentially – each device will have a unique IP address and each time you visit a website with a new device – software like Google Analytics will track your IP address.

So why does this matter?

Well, depending on the size of your organisation – this could seriously skew the data within Google Analytics. Let’s say your colleagues all login to a custom employee portal every morning – their hits to the website will be registered in the Google Analytics data.

There is a useful way that we can remove this data, as it’s likely to be not very useful for most marketers who are only concerned with the traffic that comes to their sites from their potential and existing customers.

So how do we remove an IP address from the data?

You’ll want to firstly find out what your IP address is. That’s pretty simple, simply go to Google on your device and remember if you have more than 1 device you’ll need to repeat this step.

Go to Google and search “my IP address”

Copy this address and head to your Google Analytics account.

Now of course, I’m assuming you have already installed Analytics onto your website. If you haven’t, I’ll place a link in the description for you to learn how to do that.

Once you’re into your Google Analytics account you’ll want to ensure you’re in the right property at the top here, then click on “Admin”.

On the far right hand column, select “Filters” and press “Add Filter”

Choose a filter name

Select Exclude

Select IP addresses

Select that are equal to

Paste your IP address in this box and press save

And that’s done.

It’s worth noting, that from the time you add the IP address – the data will begin to be excluded. Unfortunately it won’t exclude historical traffic only traffic going forward.