SOP 015: Exclude own traffic from Google Analytics
Exclude all traffic that is generated by you, or your employees/contractors to keep your data clean and as accurate as possible.
Last Updated / Reviewed: 07/26/2024
Execution Time: 5-10 minutes
🚀 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.
🤔 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 4 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.
__⚠️Prerequisites or requirements: __Google Analytics needs to be set up on your website. If you haven’t done so, follow SOP 163 instead.
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Define internal traffic in Google Analytics 4
01▸ Login to your Google Analytics account Click “Admin”.
02▸ Make sure you’ve selected the correct property (website) and select “Data Streams”.
03▸ Select the website that you want to implement Google Analytics 4.
04▸ At the bottom of the page, click “Configure Tag Settings” under Google Tag.
05▸ Under Settings, click “Show all”.
06▸ Click “Define internal traffic”.
07▸ Click “Create” to define the internal traffic rules.
08▸ Change the Rule name to “Internal traffic” and leave the default traffic_type value to internal.
09▸ Set the Match type to “IP address equals” and set the value to your IP address.
10▸ If you don’t know what’s your IP address, click “What’s my IP address”, and Google will show your current IP address.
11▸ If you need to exclude multiple IP addresses, such as excluding traffic from your co-workers or other devices, then click “Add condition” and repeat step 9.
12▸ You have now defined the internal traffic in Google Analytics 4, go ahead and create a filter to exclude this internal traffic.
Activating internal traffic filter in Google Analytics 4
01▸ Login to your Google Analytics account.
02▸ Click “Admin”.
03▸ Click “Data Filters” under Data Settings.
04▸ You should see a filter for internal traffic. This is the default filter that is created when you create a Google Analytics 4 property. Make sure it is in testing mode.
05▸ If it’s not in testing mode, click on the 3 dot “kebab menu” and select “Test filter”.
06▸ Now, we need to test whether the internal traffic filter is working. If it is, we will activate it.
Important: Make sure you run this test as filtering in Google Analytics 4 is a destructive operation. Once you filter data, it’s gone forever.