How to Remove Your Own Visits From Google Analytics

When using Google Analytics to track your websites traffic, one of the first steps is to exclude your own traffic, or traffic from your organisation. So lets have a look at how you can do that using your IP Address and the Google Analytics Admin interface.

Finding your IP Address

Before we head over to Google Analytics, we need to find out your IP address. Your IP address is a group of numbers that uniquely identifies your computer on the Internet. It’s like a street address, but for your computer.

So lets find out your IP. Google was nice enough to build this feature write into to Google search.

  1. Jump over to google.com and search for ‘whats my ip’Screen Shot 2013 02 23 at 4 17 15 PMA line will appear saying ‘Your public IP address is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx’
  2. Hang on to that string of numbers (keep the tab open, copy and paste it somewhere, write it down on paper lols), cause we are going to need it later.

Google Analytics Admin interface

Now lets jump over to Google Analytics. and lets get started.

  1. Log in to your Google Analytics account.Screen Shot 2013 02 23 at 4 24 24 PM
  2. Click Admin button in the top right.Screen Shot 2013 02 23 at 4 25 53 PM
  3. You are now on the Account Administration page. From the list, click the site you want to exclude your traffic fromScreen Shot 2013 02 23 at 4 27 07 PM
  4. Click on the filters tabScreen Shot 2013 02 23 at 4 28 05 PM
  5. Click ‘Add New FilterScreen Shot 2013 02 23 at 4 32 36 PM
  6. Give your Filter a Name e.g. ‘Exclude IP Home Computer’Screen Shot 2013 02 23 at 4 34 24 PM
  7. Change ‘traffic from ISP domain’ to ‘traffic from the IP address’Screen Shot 2013 02 23 at 4 38 30 PM
  8. Write in your IP addressScreen Shot 2013 02 23 at 4 40 13 PM
  9. Select the profile you want to add the filter to, and click the ‘add’ button.Screen Shot 2013 02 23 at 4 41 48 PM
  10. Click the Save ButtonScreen Shot 2013 02 23 at 4 44 06 PM

A Quick Note

Just a note, adding this filter will only work going forward, and won’t be applied to existing Google Analytics data. There is currently no way to do that.