No Worries! Semalt Expert Knows How To Setup Filters In Google Analytics

Google Analytics is responsible for collecting the information and data about all visits made to the site. To get a clear understanding of your website's performance, one might need to look at the data from the Google Analytics generated reports. It helps create the decisions to improve or alter certain elements for performance optimization.

One of the ways that site owners can view data regarding individual aspects about their visitors is through filters.

Oliver King, one of the most experienced experts from Semalt, explains how to use a Google Analytics filter to remove internal traffic from the site's reports.

Before deciding to create the Google Analytic filter to exclude company traffic from the reports, it is important that you understand the reason for doing so. Google Analytics records any visits to the site, even those from within the company. During the marketing campaign for a website, marketers may find themselves spending a lot of time on the site. They could be searching for relevant articles to share with their customers, or reviewing the site's content.

Unfortunately, these well-intentioned activities could have adverse effects. When Google Analytics records these visits, they wreak havoc on the data we rely on to determine how people got to the site and what they did once they were there. Internal traffic may also indicate false data which hampers efforts to understand the "normal" visitors' behaviors. The result is that it alters the site's metrics by presenting skewed reports. However, there is a way around this problem with the help of Google Analytics filters as it cleans our website activity from the reports.

• Open Google Analytics and log into your account.
• Navigate to the Admin section and create a new view. Make sure to leave one of them unaltered with the raw data. It acts as the backup. Create a new one for the filtered IP addresses. Come up with a descriptive name for the new view and make sure that you have the correct time zone.
• In the new view, select the tab with the "Create a Filter."
• Add the filter you want to use. If the button does not appear at this stage, you may have to ask for higher permissions from the webmaster.

• Give the new filter a name and select the type you want. In this case, choose to Exclude the traffic from an IP address which is equal to.
• Next, insert the IP address of your website. The "what is my IP address" tool is one of the easiest ways you can find out the site's current IP address.
• Whatever the IP address the tool returns, copy and paste it in the filter field of your Google Analytics.
• Save the new filter.

After completion, all the traffic from that particular IP address will not show up in the Google Analytics reports. If you do a lot of work from any other IP addresses, it would be prudent to create new filters for them as well. The same goes for third-party developers that do a lot of work on your site.