How To Filter Internal Traffic in Google Analytics

How to filter internal traffic in Google Analytics and why do you need to?

Generally, Google Analytics is used to track how people or viewers interact with your website. It is kind of obvious that you would want to see the analytics for your actual readers and not the people who are in your team working on the site, right?

If you don’t have an account yet, click here to sign up for a Google Analytics account.

For instance, if you have a design and content team that opens and interacts with the site multiple times every day doesn’t come under the traffic you want to analyze.

By default, Google Analytics all data, be it from internal or external sources. If you have your internal traffic enabled too in the Analytics account, it’ll be difficult to determine how your true viewers behave on your site.

This is where the filters are needed.

By filtering out the internal traffic, you can see the actual details about your traffic, readers and their engagements.

Steps to exclude internal traffic in Google Analytics

Filter out the IP address

To filter internal traffic in Google Analytics, you need to create a filter.

The name is pretty self-explanatory. You put some conditions on the raw data and it gets filtered accordingly.

To find out your IP address, simple google ‘what is my IP address?’. Copy the address. We will enter this IP address in the filter to exclude the traffic that comes from it.

Now, login to your Google Analytics account.

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Now, you need to create a view

In your Analytics account’s home page, click on Admin on the left panel.

You’ll be redirected to a page that looks like the picture above. Three options are displayed: create account, property and view. Click on create view.

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Name your view under the setting up your view section on the page. Select the reporting time zone and click on create view. After creating and saving it, go back to the page shown in step 2 and this time go to view settings.

Double-check that at the top-left, your selected view is opened. The view to which you want to apply this filter. And if you are applying to the whole property, check the property selected.

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Create a filter at the view level

After clicking on view settings, the page shown will look like this.

Choose the 5th option that says Filters and click on add filter. Just as you named the view, you have to name the filter as well.

In the filter type, select predefined > exclude , traffic from the IP addresses, that are equal to.

Enter your IP address and save the filter.

And you’re done! Your Analytics account will now filter out internal traffic, starting from the next 30 minutes.

A bit more about filters in Google Analytics

Filters can either be created at an account level or at a view level. The account level filter gets applied to all the views that come under it whereas a view level filter is limited to that view only.

Let’s understand the hierarchy quickly.

You can have one Analytics account through which you can either track your own site or track multiple sites of your clients. These sites or site is called a property.

There has to be a minimum of one property and the number can go up to 50.

Next is a view. A view is a subset of a property in an Analytics account. It has its own unique configurations in the form of filters, for example. Each property can have multiple views, the maximum number of views per property is 25.

One more point to remember: When you add filters to a view, they get applied in the order in which they are created.

So, if filter A says ‘hey tell me about the traffic I get from Instagram’ and filter B says ‘filter social media traffic’,

The result you’ll get is: traffic from Instagram only (which includes internal traffic). This is because the data that reaches to filter B is already just about Instagram. All of the other social media sources will not get included.

To get the correct results, filter B should come before filter A.

First, get the data about traffic from social media sources, then chisel out Instagram stats from it.

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