How To Exclude Your IP Address in Google Analytics

When analyzing client data in Google Analytics or your own website data, it’s important to exclude your own internal traffic and focus on external customers’ behavior. Company traffic can greatly skew sessions, page views, and conversion rates. This can make a big impact on website data. One solution to filter out internal traffic is to exclude your company IP address.

First, identify your IP address.

Google makes this simple. All you need to do is Google “What is my IP” and you’ll see your public IP address. You must use your public IP address, not your local IP address, as this is the address Google uses for filtering.

Excluding a singular IP address for the company is only a simple solution if your company has a static IP address. Both IPv4 and IPv6 can be submitted to the filter. Your company might also have a range of IP addresses or a subnet.

Create a filter in Google Analytics.

To create a filtered view in Google Analytics, you need to have Edit permission for the account. Then, from the Admin tab you’ll want to create a new view for “No Internal Traffic”. This is suggested so that you have one unfiltered account view just in case. Once you’ve created the “No Internal Traffic” view, click on ‘Filters’ and ‘+Add Filter’.

Next, name the filter for your own categorization to mark the exclusion of company traffic IP addresses. Select ‘Predefined’ as the Filter Type.  Then choose ‘Exclude’ from the Predefined filter types. For source, select ‘traffic from the IP addresses’ from the Select Source or Destination menu.

For singular static IP addresses:  select ‘that are equal to’ from the expression menu.

For a subnet of IP addresses: select ‘that begin with’ from the expression menu.

For a range of IP addresses:  create a custom filter to exclude IP addresses. You’ll then submit your range of IP addresses in regular expression form in the Filter Pattern box.

Verify Your Filter.

Once you have the filter view set up in Analytics, you’ll want to check to make sure that it worked. You can do this by monitoring traffic in the filtered view or by using the Google Tag Assistant Chrome extension. There you have it: clean data without employee traffic interference!

Remember that the filtered view only applies from the start of filter onward. It does not apply to historical traffic.