Skip the prose and go straight to the filters. In this post you’ll learn about separating your own traffic from your users in GA (Google Analytics). In just under a month two small clients and one prospect were in need of knowing and doing what for most of us is the very basic minimum configuration when setting up Google Analytics.
I’ve seen it time and time again and continue to see this often, so there’s definitely a large number of people doing some time intense “analysis” on Google Analytics data, that provides no insight into their website visitors at all and is very misleading.
That’s because if Google Analytics says that 50 visitors turned up at your shiny new website, without filtering your own data you may well account for half or more of those visitors, in some cases for new sites you may even account for all of them.
Nice bit of fluffy prose even if I say so myself… now for the real data slicing in GA.
You’ll get to this screen by going to one of the existing profiles, Admin at the top right corner of the orange bar, then click the New Profile button.
By default Google Analytics will catch all the data that comes to your site, that’s called All Web Site Data, you should create a new profile and name it with something meaningful and distinguishable from other sites.
For example for this site I call the new profile PM Visitors rather than just visitors, doing this will help me to identify the right profile from a long list of sites with at least two profiles each.
While we are at it, I usually also name the default profile to for example: PM All Traffic, the reason is the same as above, if you leave the default name All Web Site Data on multiple sites you’ll have a hard time identifying which is which from a long list, for example in Google Analytics Android app and other similar ones.
Create New Filter
Filters as the name suggests, filter data, the default profile in GA catches all the turnips (data).
Now click on your new profile within the Admin section still and then go to the tab Filters, funny how these things work. Click on create New Filter.
You can learn more advanced settings here: Exclude internal traffic.
Then Google My IP. It’s that simple you put that into Google and it will give you something like this: Your public IP address is 94.116.43.178.
You may want to know what an IP actually is or what it stands for.
Noun: A unique string of numbers separated by periods that identifies each computer attached to the Internet…
Get the number and include it in the new filter, once that’s done you’ll have your original profile with all data and the new one with just your visitors.
You more than likely will work from more than one location, that maybe your home your office and maybe a relative, your local pub or coffee shop, if that’s the case, it’s a good idea to setup filters for all those other places or your data will continue to be skewed.
That’s it, happy analytics!
Huh, I almost forgot to bribe you into a social share or a comment, you can even ask questions. I’m likely to reply, unless it is SPAM in which case you’ll be binned!
