Mark Regan

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Don't Count Yourself - Exclude your company from your analytical reports

No matter what the size of your company, your (and your co-workers) can have a significant impact on your analytics data.Depending on the purpose of your website, internal visitors may or may be interesting to track.  If internal visitors are treated equally to exxternal visitors, then stop reading now.  Your analytical tool likely have you covered by default.But if you don't want to see your internal traffic on your reports, then keep reading.There are three primary methods to exlude this traffic:

  1. Place a cookie on the to-be-excluded machine.
  2. Identify which domain name you want to exclude.
  3. Identify which IP address you want to exclude.

For Google Aanlytics, they have done a great job explaining the necessary steps.For Omniture's SiteCatalyst, go to "Admin" and choose "Exclude by IP".  From there you can enter the necessary IP addresses as well as look for a link that takes you to the page where you can place a cookie on you machine.  Hint: The link is hidden in the Overview paragraph.Here one trick you may need.  If you need to exclude multiple IP addresses from your Google Analytics account it could be very daunting to type them and apply them to many different profiles.  Note: I have not found a similar trick for SiteCatalyst yet.  Also note that if your IP addresses are adjacent to each other in number sequence, you can use wildcards more easily.  This is for distinct IP that are not remotely similar to one another.Within your Google Analytics account, click on the Filter Manager option at the bottom.  Then choose "Add Filter".  Name your filter "abc.com ip range 1", Predefined Filter,  Exclude, "traffic from the IP addresses" and Match.In the IP address field you will type in a regular expression.  So if you wanted to exclude 2 IP address with one filter, 2.2.2.2 and 3.3.3.3, you would type in:

^2.2.2.2|3.3.3.3$

You can continue to add your IP address until you reach the 255 character limit.  In my experience it safest to limit this to 10-12.  To create this long regular expression, use Excel with the CONCATENATE formula.  So you may need multiple filters depending upon how many addresses you need to exclude.Now if you have just applied this filter to one of your profiles.  If you need to apply it many more, just go into Filter Manager, edit the filter and apply it to each appropriate profile.Hope this helps.  Let me know how it goes.

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