Remove yourself from your Google Analytics Reports

Are your Google Analytics numbers skewed? Are you tracking yourself, making it hard to see “the real” activity on your blog? This problem is especially frustrating when you have a new blog and your own page visits have a big impact on the overall statistics. Well, look no further because the solution is in this post! We will step through how to find your IP address and filter it from your Google Analytics results.

If you haven’t done so yet, install Google Analytics on your blog before following this tutorial.

Find your IP address.

First you need to find your public IP address. To do this simply navigate to Google.com or Bing.com (I am sure there are other places you could do this as well) and type in the search field “what is my ip” and search. The first search result will then display your public IP address like the example below. I used Bing.com for this tutorial because the display for your IP address is much prettier 🙂

Create a filter in your Google Analytics.

Next, you will need to create a filter in Google Analytics to remove yourself. Sign in to your Google Analytics account.

Once signed in you should be in the home tab within analytics. Before we create a filter let me give you a brief introduction to the home page. It will help in understanding the steps of creating a filter. Within home you should see three items, all indented to different indentations like shown in the picture below. If you don’t you may have to click on the folder to expand its contents. The first item in the list represents your Google Analytics Account. The second item in your list represents your Property (note: You can create more than one property per account. You would most likely want to do this if you have multiple websites or blogs that you want to track within the same account. Each property has its own tracking code.). The third and last item represents your View.

You can create multiple views for a profile. Each view can have different filters associated to them to only show data you want in that view. For example, you can see that I have set up a second view called Exclude Admin. I did this because I wanted one view to show all web traffic without filters and a second to show only visiting traffic that was not admin. If you would like to create a new view you can do so in the admin tab.

Now that we have that out of the way, lets create a filter! Click on the Admin tab.

Within the Admin tab you will see the three categories we just discussed: Account, Property, and View. You can create a filter to remove yourself from your analytics reports in either your ACCOUNT or your VIEW. I prefer the account option because it gives you the ability to apply a filter to multiple views at the same time.

When the new page loads select NEW FILTER.

 

Here you will create the filter to remove yourself from the analytics results. Note that this filter will only filter you from future results and will not retroactively filter you.

In the filter name field, type what you want to call this filter.

Select the predefined filter radial button.

In the next three drop down menus select “Exclude”, “traffic from the IP addresses” and “that are equal to”.

And then in the IP address field input your IP address that you found at the beginning of this tutorial.

If you chose to create your filter from the account filter option you will now need to select the views you want to apply this filter to and then hit the add button.

When complete hit save!

Congratulations! You have now successfully filtered all devices on the network that use your public IP address from future Google Analytics reports! If you work from multiple locations or networks you may need to repeat this process for each network. You also need to update the IP address if you ever reset your internet connection.

Happy tracking!

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