If you have a website with Google Analytics tracking implemented there may be reasons to filter out certain data from being reported on. For example, when calculating traffic figures it’s usually not helpful to include your own traffic or the traffic from people who work on the website as they are going to visit your website an unrealistically high amount.
Why should you filter data?
Filtering or excluding certain data from your reports is important to ensure your data reports are accurate. If you have set up conversion goals and you do not set up any filters, all those visits from your web team are going to have a negative effect on the reported conversion rate of your website. Generally it is a good idea to filter as many known people and domains as possible to ensure the reported data is as accurate as possible.
Filtering by IP address
Fortunately it is possible to filter by IP address to exclude traffic. Using this method you can filter your own IP address or your web agencies IP address or anyone else who works on your website.
- Log into Google Analytics and select to edit profile settings for the website you wish to add the filter
- Scroll down to filters and select ‘add filter’
- From the filter type drop down select ‘Exclude all traffic from an IP address’
- Then enter the IP address to filter ensuring that you escape (.) the periods like xx.xx.xx.xx
Filtering by domain
Depending on how you run your site you may have a development version or local test copy of your website. Obviously there is no reason to incorporate the data from these sites into the data for the main site. You could solve this by not having the tracking tags on the development version but this can get tricky when releasing files to the live website. Much in the same way as you filter IP addresses you can filter domains. The procedure is the same as for filtering IP addresses expect you must select ‘Exclude all traffic from a domain’.
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- Google Analytics Tutorial – How to track conversion rates
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Filtering by domain seems to be more applicable these days, i have added that feature to mine, and also the above scipt
dugg!
Yeh I agree domain name is generally more useful (if you have a development version and a production version etc). If you know that you or people who work on your website have a static IP addresses then that can also be useful.
If I needed to exclude traffic from more than 1 website, would I simply setup 2 or more filters and apply it to one profile? We just launched a linkbait campaign on one of our websites, and I want to exclude the traffic stats from the social media websites (digg, stumbleupon, reddit, ect.)
Thanks,
BJ
@BJWright: yep you can just keep adding filters (although I have this feeling there is a limit of four, but that may be just for goals? – either way you can set up multiple profiles for the same website if needed.
hmm…I added the filter to exclude Digg & Stumbleupon and still received traffic stats from both of them? I guess I’ll just have to continue to play with it and see what I can get?
Thanks,
BJ
@BJ Wright: I just realised that filtering stumble/digg etc. this way would never work because I *think* filter by domain only filters for domains which have your tag on.
So for e.g, say you have http://www.mysite.com and http://test.mysite, you could block test.mysite, which would block any stats from that domain but you couldn’t block http://anothersite.com‘s referral traffic.
The only solution I could think of would be to only place the tracking tag on the page after you check the headers to see that the refer is not digg/stumble etc if that’s what you definitely want to do.
“exclude all traffic from a domain” is NOT thought as a way to exclude traffic to a subdomain of your site, but “use this filter to exclude traffic from a specific domain, such as an ISP or company network.”
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-au&answer=55593
Randolf we tried to simply use this filter to block traffic stats from one site, with no luck. If you have had success in using this filter this way, could you explain how you set it up?
You can only block traffic from all users SURFING with an ISP or from one company (e.g. aol.com, comcast.net, t-dialin.net) with the “exclude all traffic from” filter. If you want to filter users with a certain referrer or traffic to one of your own subdomains you need to use other filters. The details stated here are simply inaccurate…
I’ve noticed my IP address varies wildly, only the first octet is constant making an accurate filter impossible?
Can anybody explain me the adverse effects of filter on site traffic report. Actually I had added filter to judge traffic from article. I kept it for three days and then deleted the filters. I don’t know but as I added and remove the filters, I observed a drastic negative impact on my traffic on the respective days. I studied the Google Analytics for traffic but I didn’t found any specific reason. So is this an effect due to removal of filters??
Profile filters are permanent (destructive). Everything that was left out is gone for good. You can not get the data back by removing the filter. You should therefore be careful when applying a filter. Create a new profile to test your new filter. If you make a mistake, you have your other profiles to get the data from. See this article for more information: http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/2009/12/09/how-to-choose-between-advanced-segments-versus-profile-filters-in-google-analytics/