Digital Marketer

From New Zealand, lives in Spain.
Servicing clients from all around the English speaking world.

Exclude IP Address from Google Analytics

Why Filter IPs From Analytics?

Google Analytics is a very powerful tool to understand your visitors actions and behaviours while they are on your site, by looking at the various reports you can find issues, bottlenecks and ultimately improve how your site reaches its goals.

But the conclusions you draw from Analytics can only be as good as the accuracy of the data in there. If the data is not accurate you may make decisions that don’t represent what is truly happening on the site.
Your actions and the actions of your staff on the site are most likely skewing the data giving you a warped view of what the real visitors are doing on the site. 

Luckily excluding staff actions on the site is easy.

To do it we just need to find out the IP address that your network connects to the internet and exclude it from being counted in Google Analytics.

Note: This can only work to exclude traffic from set locations like your home, office or local coffee shop and doesn’t work for accessing the site while out and about using mobile data.

What’s My IP?

To find out your IP just go here: https://whatismyipaddress.com/
You’ll see two numbers named IPv6 and IPv4, we only need one and can exclude your IP using either.

Screenshot of an IP address example

How To Filter My IP

  1. Login to Google Analytics and select your profile
  2. Click Admin in the bottom left corner of the page
  3. Under the View column select Filters

Screenshot of Google Analytics Admin Panel

4. Click Add Filter
5. Give the filter a name
6. Leave Filter Type as predefined
7. It should read: Exclude + traffic from the IP addresses + that are equal to
8.Enter your IP address you found out before

IP Exclude Settings in Google Analytics

That’s it, Done!

Note: This will only apply to this view, it is always best practise to have a view of raw data where no filters are applied so you have a backup should something go wrong. Once the data hits Analytics it can’t be undone so if you make filters and end up making a mistake there is no way to get that missed data back.

Once the above steps are complete your data will be much ‘cleaner’, this won’t change the historical data in your reports but will improve the accuracy of what you see going forward.

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