As a developer and an enthusiast of metrics and media, it’s handy to help flesh out your numbers and “weed yourself out.” Numbers – especially metrics – can help define success or failure of campaigns.
Why would I filter myself?
Why should you neglect yourself? Ever number counts, right? Well, because as a developer (or author, or editor, or paranoid owner) you can skew your metrics numbers by visiting, testing, reloading, hitting the page again and again – throwing off all your numbers. You need unadulterated materials to work with – so at launch when all the employees are visiting that cool new micro site, you know that those million visits were filtered out, which makes the million other visits a lot more relevant.
How to: filter by IP address
Google makes it incredibly easy – you just need to follow a few basic steps.
- Collect the IP addresses you need blocked (i.e. the network you want blocked).
- Log in to Google Analytics and select “edit” under profile, in the same row as your site.
Google Analytics Dashboard Snap-shot
- Go to the section ‘Filters applied to profile’ and select ‘+Add Filter.’
- For this example we want to choose ‘Exclude all traffic from an IP address’
- Enter the IP address(es) you collected, and in true coders fashion, we are going to ‘escape’ the ‘.’ using a backslash – like xxx\.xxx\.xx\.xx
How to: filter by domain
Working on a recent project, I noticed that their hits were skyrocketing – due to the massive amounts of hits from my testing (and their testing, and QA). They had no filters set up on their development site!
As a developer, this should be standard practice – or, if you have a metrics person to work with, have them set up the filter for you. You don’t want to “comment out” the analytics code – this can cause you to forget to uncomment it, or worse case, find another developer has deleted the un-used code (and if you don’t have a subversion repository, you could lose whatever custom code was being used). Fortunately, it’s just as easy to filter out your test domains – On step four, you just select ‘Exclude all traffic from a domain’ and enter it in – a la ‘dev.test.com.’
