How to Exclude Internal Company Traffic From Your Google Analytics Data
February 26th, 2010 // 12:20 am @ Jay
One 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)
You’ll be taken to a “Create New Filter” page.
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.
Category : How-to &My Blog &Web Analytics & Measurement
PSA: Web Site “Hits” is NOT a Valid Measurement Metric. It Hasn’t Been Since 1999.
July 30th, 2009 // 2:23 pm @ Jay
When someone asks me how many “hits” their Web site is getting, they really want to know is how many visitors (“visits”) came to their site.
I think a lot of people use “hits” and “visits” interchangeably. This isn’t a problem unless you (or your team) are actually looking at “hits” in your Web analytics software (i.e. Google Analytics) and counting them as “visits” in your company marketing reports.
Let me quickly explain the difference between “hits” and “visits:”
Back in the early days of the Internet, “hits” was a commonly used metric. It was all about how many “hits” your Web site was getting. The bigger the number, the better.
The problem is that it’s a misleading number.
Let’s assume for a second that your home page has your company logo, two photos and some copy. When someone visits that page, your Web analytics software (i.e. Google Analytics) is going to count 4 hits (the logo, two photos and the page itself).
It should actually only count as one visit. In this example, if you have 50 people visit your home page, there are going to be 200 hits. Let’s expand this example even further. What if these 50 people visit one more page (that has two images on it)? That’s an additional 3 hits for that page multiplied by 50 visitors (150 total hits). Take those additional 150 hits and add them to the original 200 hits. That’s 350 hits and still only 50 visits.
A “visit” (or session) begins when someone loads a page on your Web site in their Internet browser and ends when the end-user leaves the site (or closes their browser). In addition, visits time out after a set period of time (typically 30 minutes).
Do you see how “hits” can be a misleading number?
Category : My Blog &Web Analytics & Measurement
