Google Analytics is a great method of tracking how external customers interact with your website. But, how do you ensure you aren’t tracking your own internal website visits when using this tool? If your website is set as your homepage browser, or you happen to spend lots of time visiting your site, you might find that your Google Analytics web traffic dashboard has some quite skewed results. 

Laura England, junior account manager at Stone Junction, explains.


Monitoring internal web traffic can be useful in some instances. For example, if you are undertaking an internal marketing campaign or tracking how staff use the resources on your website. However, Analytics is typically used to track external visits.

When your reporting views contains visits from both internal and external traffic, it can become difficult to determine how potential customers are interacting with your site. To remove this potential confusion, you need to filter your own IP address.

Here’s what you will need to do:

1. Follow the instructions to create a new filter in your Google Analytics view 
2. Select the ‘exclude’ filter type from the drop-down menu 
3. Select the source or destination as ‘traffic from the IP address’ 
4. Then simply, enter your IP address 

Not sure what your IP address is? Simply Google ‘what's my IP address?’ to find out instantly.

If you have multiple IP addresses to exclude, you can use this same method to create additional filters for each IP address. This simple change can ensure your web traffic reports aren’t skewed with inaccurate data from internal hits.

For help implementing this, or any other questions in relation to Google Analytics, speak to the team at Stone Junction on +44 (0) 1785 225416 or laura@stonejunction.co.uk.