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ByDave Dibble

Goal: To exclude all traffic that is generated by you, or your employees/contractors.

Ideal Outcome: Your internal traffic will not affect your Google Analytics’ metrics. 

Pre-requisites or requirements: Google Analytics needs to be set up on your website. Extra views should be configured in your Google Analytics property. If you haven’t done either, or one of these you can do so by following this SOP.

The specific steps on this SOP apply only to Universal Google Analytics (not Google Analytics 4). If you followed other ClickMinded SOPs to create your Google Analytics account or if you set up Google Analytics before October 2020 you most likely have a Universal Analytics property. 

Why this is important: Your internal traffic can seriously skew your metrics to the point of getting you to make wrong decisions. You want to keep your data clean and as accurate as possible.

Where this is done: In your Google Analytics account.

When this is done: As soon as you set up your Google Analytics account, and whenever you suspect internal traffic might be skewing your data.

Who does this: The person responsible for Analytics. You and your employees / contractors.

  • SOP Update: Google Analytics 4 

 

? Note: Google has released a new version of Google Analytics in October 2020, this new version can be set as a property alongside its standard version “Universal Analytics”.

The “Universal Analytics” properties will likely be supported by Google for years to come. Currently, all ClickMinded SOPs support Universal Analytics exclusively. 

 

To make sure you can follow this step-by-step SOP make sure you have selected the Universal Analytics property at all times: 

 

  1. On the top left corner click on the Account Dropdown and select a view within your Universal Analytics property (Not the GA4 property): 

? Note: You can identify your Universal Analytics property by noticing the ‘UA-’ prefix in the Property ID below its name: 

  • Check If your own traffic is being recorded

 

Note: This step requires the Google Chrome’s Google Tag Assistant extension to be installed on your browser. 

 

  1. Open your website in your browser. 
  2. Click on the Tag Assistant extension icon next to the address bar, and then hit “Record”: 
  1. Refresh your page.
  2. Click on the Tag Assistant extension icon again and then click “Stop Recording”:
  3. Click “Show Full Report”:
    1. You will be taken to the Google Tag Assistant Report. On the top, click on “Google Analytics Report”.
  • Note: You need to be logged in to a Google Account that has access to the Google Analytics account for your website. 


  • Note: If you see a message displaying “No hits were found in this recording.” It means your own traffic is not being recorded, most likely due to an AdBlocker, Privacy Extension, or the Google Opt-Out extension. You can either end the test here, or, if you want to check if the traffic from your network is being recorded on devices that do not have those extensions installed, you should disable those extensions and proceed to step 7.

  

  1. If you have multiple views configured in Google Analytics you should select the views you want to analyze  (you can select all of them) and then hit “Ok”: 

Note: Make sure you select the Google Analytics – Universal Analytics property (starts with UA-) 

 

  1. Click “Change location”:

 

  1. Select “Use my externally visible IP address” and click “Update”.
  • Note: If you are not in your office or connected to your local network at the time of testing you will want to find out your local network’s IP Address and select “Use a specific IP address” instead, to do that you have 2 options: 
    1. Ask the person responsible for your office’s network or your ISP (Internet Service Provider): 
      1. Is our network IP Address static? If your IP address is not static, excluding it from Google Analytics will not be a long-term solution.
      2. What is our external IP address?  This is the IP address you will type in the “IP Address” field inside the “Change Location” menu.
    2. Check it for yourself:
      1. Connect to your Office’s local network.
      2. Go to http://beta.speedtest.net/ 
      3. Locate your IP address on the page:
  1. Call your ISP and ask them if your network’s IP address is static. 
    1. Note: If you want to exclude your local IP address your Office’s IP address must be static.

 

  1. The page will refresh and once again you will be taken to the “Google Analytics Report”. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and select the page you just loaded, and then click on “Hit 1”:

 

    1. Under each of your views you will be able to see how the “hit” was processed. If you see that 1 hit has been recorded and, below the “Mutations” group, you see a “Hit captured without modifications” message. It means your interactions with your website are being recorded to that view. 
  • Note: If you have followed this SOP to exclude your own network successfully (or if you have applied a filter before), you should now see this message under the view that the filter was applied to. This means your traffic is not being recorded: 


  • Excluding specific devices

 

Note: This will prevent the traffic on those devices from being recorded, no matter what network they are connected to. This is an excellent solution if you usually use the same devices to work on your website. 

 

Note 2: This will exclude your traffic from being recorded on all websites that use Google Analytics, not only on your own website. You can always turn off the extension if for some reason you want to be tracked again.

 

Note 3: This SOP assumes you’re using Google Chrome. If you are using a different browser the steps might vary slightly. 

 

  1. Go to https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout 
  2. Click the blue button to download the Add-on:
  1. If you are using Chrome, the Chrome Store will open, click “Add to Chrome”:

 

  1. Click “Add extension”
    1. That’s it! You will notice a grey Google logo appearing on your extension bar. Your extension is installed and this device is not being recorded by Google Analytics as long as you are using this browser with this extension turned on.
  • Note: If you want to verify that it is working you can follow the procedure in the beginning of this SOP. If everything is working you will be able to see the message that is displayed in the step 6.b. of the “Check If your traffic is being recorded” section. 

 

    1. You have successfully excluded your own traffic from being recorded, now you want to make sure your employees and contractors are also doing the same thing.
      1. Here is an email template you can use to send to everyone that works with you: 
  • Hi,

    In order to prevent our own website traffic from being recorded by Google Analytics I would like to ask you to install the “Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on” available here: 

This add-on is available for IE11, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera and should be installed on all browsers and devices that you are currently using. 

 

Thanks!

  • Excluding a network

 

    1. Find out the IP address of your network: 
  • Note: If you have followed the procedure in the beginning of this SOP to check If your traffic is being recorded there is no need to do this again. These are the exact same steps as before.

 

  1. Ask the person in responsible for your office network or your ISP (Internet Service Provider): 
    1. Is our network IP Address static? If your IP address is not static, excluding it from Google Analytics will not be a long-term solution. 
    2. What is our external IP address?  This is the IP address you will type in the “IP Address” field inside the “Change Location” menu. 
  2. Check it for yourself:
    1. Connect to your Office’s local network.
    2. Go to http://beta.speedtest.net/ 
    3. Locate your IP address on the page:
  1. Call your ISP and ask them if your network’s IP address is static. 
    1. Note: If you want to exclude your local IP address your Office’s IP address must be static.

 

  1. Go to your Google Analytics Admin panel by clicking here.

 

    1. If you have multiple Google Analytics accounts make sure you have selected the correct account, property, and view: 
  • Remember: Filters are destructive, they permanently modify the incoming hits. That’s why you should make sure you are not doing these changes in your main and only view. For this SOP we are going to be using the “Staging View”, If you haven’t set up views on your account, check out our Google Analytics setup SOP.
  • Important Note: Make sure you’re selecting the Universal Analytics property (and not a GA4 property) 

 

You can identify your Universal Analytics property by noticing the ‘UA-’ prefix in the Property ID.

 

  1. Click on “Filters”:

 

  1. Click on “Add Filter”:

 

  1. You will now need to select between a “Predefined” or a “Custom” filter:
  • If you would want to exclude only 1 IP address, select “Predefined”: 

 

Filter Name: Pick a name that you think will be easy to identify in the future. (e.g.: Exclude Office Network Traffic)

Filter Type: Predefined

Select Filter Type: Exclude

Select Source or Destination: Traffic from the IP addresses

Select Expression: That are equal to

IP Address: The external IP address of your network.

 

  • If there are multiple IP addresses that you would want to exclude at once (your employees’ home network and your office network for instance) select “Custom”:
    • Filter Name: Pick a name that you think will be easy to identify in the future. (e.g.: Exclude Home and Office Traffic)
    • Filter Type: Custom
    • Select Filter Type: Exclude
    • Filter Field: IP Address
    • Filter Pattern:
      • If you are familiar with regex you can insert your own regex expression here to match the IPs you want to exclude. 
      • If you are not familiar or know what regex is you should do the following steps: 
        1. List the IPs that you want to exclude:
          • E.g.: 150.210.231.30 and 72.229.28.185
        2. Separate all of them with a pipe symbol (this is a pipe symbol → | )
          • E.g.: 150.210.231.30|72.229.28.185
        3. In each of the IP Addresses add a ^ in the beginning of the IP address, and a dollar sign $ in the end. 
          • E.g.: ^150.210.231.30$|^72.229.28.185$
        4. Finally all you have to do is to add a \ before each dot and you’re ready to copy your expression to the field in Google Analytics. 
          • E.g.: 

^150\.210\.231\.30$|^72\.229\.28\.185$

 

    1. That’s it! You have just excluded that network from your View, you should be able to see that in your “View Filters” table:
  • Remember: Filters might require up to 24 hours before they are applied to your data. After you’ve been monitoring your “staging view” for a while, when you are sure everything is working properly you will want to replicate this procedure on your Main View.

 

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