Hi folks, hope all my visitors from Ireland enjoyed the long weekend, I know I certainly did. Today I’m going to go through the steps which you need to do to have Google Analytics filter out and exclude all data from your own personal visits to your website even if you are on a dynamic IP. I visit this site a lot to check the blog and forums in particular so I do not want my visits artifically inflating my ‘real’ visitor data, if your site is generally static you will not have a need to visit it that often, so perhaps filtering out your own visits is not needed but only you can determine this.
Up until recently I did not know this could be done as since I’m an Esat/BT/IOL (or whatever they’re calling themselves thesedays) broadband customer I did not have a permanent static IP which I could use to identify my machine and thus exclude by IP, additionally I couldn’t filter by my network location which is ‘Ireland On-Line Broadband Customers’ as this would of course filter out visitor data for all IOL broadband customers.
The solution is then to use cookies as opposed to IP addresses, the overall idea is to set a cookie and then use the filter interface to instruct Google Analytics to filter out and ignore all assocated visit data from all machines which have this cookie set on them. To set the cookie you need to create a new page on your domain with the following code:
Please note that this code is in addition to the Google Analytics tracking code that you have on every page of your website. Next you need to visit this page from all computers that you would like to exclude from your reports, to set the cookie on each machine.
The final step is to actually create the filter via your Google Analytics account. For this you will need to create an exclude filter to remove data from visitors with this cookie set. Follow the instructions at http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=27207&topic=2970 to create a filter with the following settings:
Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: no_report
Case Sensitive: No
That’s it, to verify this is working correctly I recommend creating and visiting (a couple of times) a temporary page (say temp1.html) which has the regular analytics tracking code on it before you visit the page which sets the cookie, the next day in the content reports section in Google Analytics you can locate the hits to this page (which must have come from you as no one else knows about the page). After this, visit the page which has the cookie set code and then revisit temp1.html a couple of times, you should find no new hits to temp1.html when you recheck your stats the following day.
If you use multiple browsers you will need to visit the set cookie page from all them as they all store cookies in different locations. Any questions let me know.
