Semalt Shares A Guide To Excluding Own Visits From Google Analytics

Apart from ridding the website from referral spam and other types of spam, Google advocates for the exclusion of internal traffic in development and production of the website. There is a reason why owners should abide by this. There is the risk of distorting the information contained in the Google Analytics results. If one creates a search on Google for the ways through which one can exclude themselves from the traffic returns, there is a possibility that they will find a plethora of solutions.

However, analyzing all the mechanisms, suggested by Ivan Konovalov, the expert from Semalt, will most likely come down to either one of the following two approaches.

The solutions to exclude one's visits:

• Creating a filter in Google Analytics to exclude the IP address from all traffic reports.
• Creating a page which has a cookie that sets it apart from the other web pages that Google Analytics has to crawl.

Problems

The solutions as depicted above are quite silly in my opinion. First of all, there are no standard IP addresses as they are set to change. It is a common thing for ISPs to change the IP addresses for their subscribers. Contrary to popular opinion, they may do so more regularly than one would imagine. In addition to this, the proliferation of gadgets with access to the internet has made it possible for users to access web portals from any location. It, therefore, means that attempting to maintain a list of all IP addresses accessing a site would be a nightmare for the organization.

The Cookie approach is sure to work. Nevertheless, it is tedious to create and maintain the page intended to set the cookie. Also, verifying whether the cookie works or if it is on is a difficult task to complete. If one cannot quite trace where their browser cookie is would mean that they have to create a new cookie every time they attempt to access the site, which in my opinion, is quite a nuisance.

JavaScript

Another reason why the two solutions are implausible is the fact that it is straightforward to accomplish the primary task using a JavaScript. Before including the Google Analytics code snippet, check how to perform a simple exclusion.

Excluding Localhost Traffic

If one conducts a website test on a local server, it is only logical that you do not want this visit to record as a customer visit. Therefore, one must exclude this created traffic. One will have to create a bookmark which includes the request parameter in the URL. Following this, they can use it to access the site and will not experience any local host traffic recordings. Further, adding a cookie to the code is prudent, or utilize the local storage to conduct tests since it saves all preferences created. Through this, one does not have to execute an order to include the requested parameter. To find the full code, visit www.tjvantoll.com and search for how to exclude own visits from the development and production of the website.

There is also an option to combine both methods where the excluded options are all localhost traffic and all other pages which have their analytics off.