Semalt Expert On Identifying And Filtering Internal Traffic From Google Analytics

Filtering out the traffic is one of the primary challenges, and there are various blog posts and articles about the ways to identify and filter internal traffic from the Google Analytics accounts.

However, this post, provided by Andrew Dyhan, a top expert from Semalt, will try to round the most reliable solutions, providing proper code exampled when applicable.

Why is it important?

Based on the size of your firm, internal traffic might cause severe problems in the Google Analytics account. Employees never act like typical users and can alter the metrics – such as pages views, bounce rate, and sessions. Most importantly, they will impact the conversion rate, bid strategies, business decisions and budget of your organization. If you want to filter out as much vendor and employee traffic as possible, you should take the multi-tiered approach and combine different solutions.

IP Address Filtering:

Filtering out the employees by IP addresses is one of the best and easiest ways. If you are the owner of a small-sized firm, you can easily exclude the traffic to your website that is coming from the suspicious IP addresses. On the other hand, the multinational companies have their own static IP addresses, which means we cannot block the traffic coming from those IPs. In addition, you cannot prevent the traffic coming from your office. If you are unsure of your IP address, you can do a Google search for "my IP address." Also, you can use other tools or may want to check with your IT expert.

IPv4 address will look something like 192.148.1.1 and the IPv6 address looks like 2001:0db8:85a6:0044:1000:1a2b:0357:7337. Google can recognise and support the filters for IPv4 and IPv6.

Creating Filters:

The actual procedure is quite easy, but you should have the Edit permission at the Account level for creating the filters. Go to the Admin section and select the All Filters option from the left side. For one IP address, you should use a default filter and paste in the UP address correctly. For the IP address range, you should select the Custom Filters and click on the Exclude option. Then, you should enter the regular expression for the IP address range.

Filter by Network Domain:

If you are the owner of a big company, you might have to filter by network domain. There are some Domain Lookup programs where you will have to insert the IP address and check if your organization's name is returned. For small-sized companies, it's usually the name of the service provider. You should check the status by navigating to the Domain report in your Google Analytics account. Be careful while creating the network domain filters and IP address and make sure that you have not filtered out the non-employees.

Filter by the Custom Dimension:

If you are unable to identify the employee by his location, you should look for the less-than-ideal solutions. The best solution, however, is determining someone as the employee and save it as a user-level custom dimension. A custom dimension is the only way to add information to the Google Analytics account about sessions, users, specific hits, and users. The custom dimensions are available in the Universal Analytics and provide you with more flexibility and characteristics than the predecessors – custom variables.