How to exclude yourself from Google analytics

5 comments Advanced, Google, How-To

Dec 04

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When you have a website that is receiving only a couple of hundred “visits” per day and you account for 20 of those you are going to greatly skew your Google analytics results. Excluding yourself from being counted in the stats is really quite simple and can be easily accomplished by using the filter tool inside your Google analytics account.

The following video will show you how to easily exclude your own visits from your Google analytics.

The problem with not excluding your own activity from your Google analytics results is that if you account for 10% or even more of your site traffic, and many of you do, your results are going to be in error by 10% or more. It will affect your time on site, pages viewed, bounce rate, and other statistics as well.

You can accomplish this task in less than 4 minutes even if you have never done it before. Once you create your new filter it can easily be applied to all of your sites linked with that same account.

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  • http://viewsouthcarolinarealestate.com markbrian

    Ken, how quickly will I see the filter exclude my IP from the results?

    • http://thekencook.com Ken Cook

      Mark your older visits will not be purged but if you have applied the filter it should begin immediately and going forward.

  • Rainer Fischer

    Great little video. Thx for the help. What about visits from my iPhone? How do I exclude them?

    • http://thekencook.com Ken Cook

      You can do the same for your iPhone or you can create and install a custom cookie on your device (or any device with a browser that holds cookies). After creating the cookie you just need to create a custom filter to look for the custom field you created in your custom cookie.

  • Sarah

    Old post, but still valid. Thanx for the tutorial. I would like to do the same with my phone (HTC), but need something more detailed than “create a custom coockie”. Have no idea what you are talking about hahaha.. Could I be so lucky that you have a tutorial about it?