Google Analytics Filter – IP Addresses

Filter Name: IP Address

Filter Purpose: Whether your website serves a large organization or is a small “mom and pop shop” filtering out internal traffic can make a big difference in the statistics you generate from Google Analytics – or any analytics package for that matter.  If you measure Goals (and I strongly recommend you do), in general, an internal visitor to the site (employee etc) is less likely to complete a goal (form fill out or purchase) as that isn’t their intention of visiting the site.  Further to that, many large organizations set their computers to default to the company home page as the first site a browser loads when opening.  As a result, you would most likely see an abnormally high bounce rate, low page views and skewed numbers to your return visitor stats.  Thus, filtering out your internal traffic is very important.

Filter Difficulty: easy – moderate (depending on if you have multiple IP ranges to filter).

Instructions:

1. Make a record of the individual IP addresses and a list of the IP ranges for your company.

2. Create individual IP filters for the individual IP addresses, be careful to use the proper regular expressions when creating your filter.  For example, the IP address 173.32.223.162 should be entered in as  173\.32\.223\.162

3. Take your IP ranges and enter them into Google’s handy IP Address Exclusion generator here: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55572

An individual IP Address Exclusion should look like this:

untitled 300x172 Google Analytics Filter   IP Addresses

An IP range filter, using Google’s tool above, should look like this:

untitled 3 300x165 Google Analytics Filter   IP Addresses

Filter Name: IP Address Filter

Filter Type: Exclude All Traffic from an IP Address

Filter Field: IP Address

Advanced Filter, Analytics basics, Google Analytics Filters

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