How To Get Rid Of Internal Traffic In Google Analytics – Semalt Advice
Building a custom Google Analytics (GA) Reports is a requirement to gain a deep view of a site visitor's behavior and for better traffic analysis. A common concern thus arises among new analytics internet users like how to exclude traffic from offices and from City/Country or IP to view useful traffic on a website. Internet experts note that the heaviest users of a site tend to be staff within an organization. Thus, it makes sense to eliminate this group of users from Google Analytics traffic to avoid inflating the figures representing visitors of a website. A site's data can also be skewed by internal site users and cause a detrimental impact on conversion rate optimization. Google Analytics is deemed as a very smart tool that provides a technique of excluding data through filter function.
In this article, Lisa Mitchell, the leading expert from Semalt, describes the exclusion process.
Important information about IP addresses
Google Analytics (GA) gathers and stores data about every visit to a website. Although IP addresses do not reveal personal information about a site visitor, it records their internet accessible (public) IP address. Each internet accessible address on the web is unique and describes a router which is a box on site visitor's internal network which links their tablets, smart phones, and computers to the internet.
Most small business and domestic broadband connections have dynamic IP addresses. It implies that the addresses will sporadically change. Contrary, odd broadband customers and most businesses have routers that are configured with static (non-changing) IP addresses. Therefore, to eliminate internal traffic from GA, a user must find out the type of IP addresses used in their organizations.
Google Analytics IP Exclusion
Traffic from internal departments such as staff visiting the website or even own visit should be excluded so as obtain more realistic Google Analytics data. IP exclusion is done with Google Analytics, and a user must list down all the IP addresses they wish to exclude. Site owners must also note that many filters can be created on a single filter in situations where multiple addresses are to be excluded.
Country/City Google Analytics Exclusion
Similar to IP exclusion marketer, a user might want to exclude traffic from a city or a country for excellent analysis. Therefore, a user can build a filter that eliminates traffic from specific nations of the world. By excluding a country, one stops hits originating from excluded cities or countries from being part of Google Analytics traffic. A country or a city can be excluded for one major reason – to prevent spam hits. For instance, (India or China) is a Google Analytic country exclusion that prevents traffic from India and China except for paid traffic search.
Filtering paid search traffic is another technique of obtaining more relevant information from a targeted location. This helps to list the preferred information while running a paid advertising campaign in a target market location. In this regard, a site owner can determine how a paid search traffic will use their site and move through a conversion channel.