February 2010

How to Exclude Internal Company Traffic From Your Google Analytics Data

by Jay on February 26, 2010 · 0 comments

in How-to, Web Analytics & Measurement

ga_filter3_2.25.10One of the quickest ways to negatively inflate/skew your Google Analytics data is to include internal company site traffic.

Many companies have their Web site set as the home page in their Internet browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome). Every time an employee opens their browser to surf the Internet, the company Web site comes up.

It’s not just visits that gets skewed. Your bounce rate shoots up and your average time on site goes way down. Plus, your home page traffic is not going to be proportional to the traffic on other pages of your site.

It’s easy to filter out your internal traffic. Here are 4 simple steps:

1) Find out your network’s IP address. Depending on company size, you may have multiple IP addresses. If you have an IT person, ask him. If you don’t have someone, go to www.WhatisMyIP.com. As soon as the site pulls up, you should see “Your IP Address Is:” and a number that looks something like “72.135.156.44″ directly below it. This is your IP address.

2) Login to your Google Analytics account. At the bottom right corner of the page you should see a “Filter Manager” link. Click it.

3) Click on “+ Add Filter” in the top right corner (denoted by the red arrow below)

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You’ll be taken to a “Create New Filter” page.

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Give your filter a name. I called my “Exclude company traffic.”

Since we want to exclude traffic from our IP address, select “Exclude,” “traffic from the IP addresses,” and “that are equal to” in the three dropdown menus.

Enter your IP address. Mine was “72.135.156.44.”

Select which Web sites you want to filter by clicking on the appropriate Web site profile(s) and then clicking “Add>>”

Click “Save Changes”

4) You’re done! Sit back and relax knowing that your Web site traffic activity is a little more accurate.

If you’re smart, you’ll exclude your marketing team’s IP address as well in case they want to inflate the numbers in an attempt to show how good of a job they’re doing.

Additional resources: Google Analytics has a good help page with more information about excluding internal traffic.

Don’t Let Your Programmer Hold You Hostage

by Jay on February 24, 2010 · 0 comments

in Website Design & Development

hostage

An inevitable part of hiring someone to build your Web site is that they will need to set up various services or accounts on your behalf.

Some examples could include:

  • Registering a domain name (www.yourcompanyname.com) for your Web site through a domain registrar like GoDaddy or Network Solutions
  • Setting up Web site hosting
  • Setting up Google services like Google Analytics, Google Adwords or Google Webmaster Tools

What’s the problem you ask?

Your programmer could get hit by a bus, go out of business or flat out refuse to give you access to something that he set up. I’ve seen it all (except the one about getting hit by a bus). It could happen.

Most of Google’s services (Google Analytics, Google Adwords or Google Webmaster Tools account) are non-transferrable. A programmer can give you access to these accounts but ultimately he can cut off your access at anytime or delete your account if he chooses.

If you’ve ever tried to access a GoDaddy account set up by someone else without the login information, you know that it takes an act of Congress to access the domains. I’ve seen situations where the client couldn’t get into an account to renew one of their main domains and had it expire. Then they had to pay a fortune to get the domain back. It’s a nightmare.

Here’s how to avoid disaster:

  • If you need to register domains, go to GoDaddy (or other domain registrar of your choice – Network Solutions is another) and create your own account. It’s free and you don’t have to worry about the domains expiring. If you’re intimidated by the domain registration process, check out this how-to video I created
  • Tell your programmer that you want all services set up with your contact information
  • Don’t let the programmer set up Google services using his own Google account. My suggestion is to set up a Gmail account and roll all the Google services under that
  • Make sure you have full control of all accounts and services (including your Web site hosting account) before the project is finished

None of the things mentioned above are a big deal as long as they’re thought of upfront. If you’re not prepared, you could run into major problems down the road.

Have you experienced any of the situations above? What happened?

Photo by sindesign