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I'm relatively new to seriously working with Google Analytics (I can obviously review page views and referrals) but I want to get something back now.

One of the first things to do is remove myself from being tracked which I understand is using a filter, with my IP address.

My question is, since IP addresses change periodically, even on always on cable connections, how do I account for this change? Do I have to keep tabs on it? How about in a situation where there are a couple of IP addresses always working on the server?

Thanks Rich

3 Answers 3

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If you are using dynamically generated webpages (eg. PHP, Python, Rails, Perl, etc) then you can set yourself a cookie which the page looks for and then only includes the tracking script if it fails to find that cookie. This is the solution that most CMS systems seem to use for Google Analytics code, and it works quite well since it's just part of the normal login process.

Alternatively, especially if it is static html files, create a second website for yourself to work on and then come up with some way of synchronising the files from this second website to the live server and add the tracking code whilst synchronising.

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Be ignoraant.

Seriously.

Unless your website is a "blog of me looking out of the window" your own traffic simply is not relevant. Once you have 200-300 visitors per day - do you really need to count your own views? They wont really change anything relevant.

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This might be the simplest and sturdiest way to conceal your own activity on a website from GA, i.e., so that it is not counted by client-side analytics: create a unique user-agent.

As evidenced by the fact that Google has published instructions for how to set up a filter to exclude data from a custom user agent string, this technique is at least tacitly endorsed by Google.

Here's one way to do it:

  • open a browser window in Firefox;
  • type "about:config" (without quotes) in the address bar;
  • press 'return'
  • right-click the blank area to get a contextual drop-down menu;
  • select "New" from that List, then select 'String';
  • a dialog will open and prompt you to "Enter the preference name";
  • type "general.useragent.override" in the text box then click 'ok'
  • enter a user agent string of your choice

That's it. Now all you have to do is set up a Filter in your GA account. Here are simple step-by-step instructions from the Google Analytics Team for setting up a Filter to exclude a particular user agent.

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