Before we explain how to filter out your own traffic in GA, it is probably a good idea to explain why we might want to do so…
Why should you filter out your own traffic?
We all know the importance of seeing how users interact with your website, however unless you have excluded your own traffic, this data will be skewed by how you or your employees are interacting with the website! Having your own activity included within your main GA reporting view will pollute the data meaning that what you see in GA may not be an accurate representation of how users are using your site.
There are a few options to help you do this, however here are the two we prefer:
Options for filtering out the traffic
1. Filter out your IP address
2. Use UTM parameters to classify your internal traffic
Option 1
If you have a static IP address, and only a couple of locations where you (and your staff) will access your site, this will work well for you.
Step 1
Access the filters through the Admin section of GA. This can be done at account level (which is very useful if you need to use it for more than one view) or view level (useful if you only want to use the filter for a single view).
Step 2
Create a new filter to exclude the IP address you wish to exclude. You can use the predefined filter for a single IP address
Or a custom filter which reads regex to exclude multiple IP addresses. (See our regex guide for how to use regex in GA https://polkadotdata.com/google-analytics/regex-for-google-analytics/ )
Option 2
If you have a dynamic IP address, or there are multiple staff members working from multiple locations, this may be a better method for you.
Step 1
Generate a URL with UTM parameters on – Google has a great tool to help do this https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/
Ensure that source, medium and campaign are ALL entered so it can be read correctly by GA.
Step 2
Share this URL with all staff members and ask them to save it as a bookmark and to enter the site through that link. Ideally it should be clicked each time they go to the website, but as long as it is clicked every week or so to make sure the campaign is still tracking, that will also work.
Step 3
Set up a filter in GA to exclude medium equal to “internal-teams”
Optional extra
Something we have found is interesting is monitoring how internal traffic is using your site. You can do this by setting up a new view to include only your internal traffic. You could even include each team as their own campaign and see how the traffic differs between teams.
There are so many options and ways this can power up your GA use, get in touch if you would like to discuss it some more with one of our experts!