User Filters in Google Analytics

Most webmasters who use Google Analytics may not be looking at the true, accurate statistics. This is because very few people have user filters set up. User filters will help you to get a more accurate view of the number of visitors to your website (and all those other things you should be using analytics for, but we’ll get to that in another post, so subscribe for more tips about analytics soon).

Getting your website upgraded or visiting it regularly? If either of those are true, it’s likely that you’re going to be saturating your analytics with visits from yourself or from your developers.

To fix this, what you need to do is set up a user filter so that visits from an IP address that you specify are not included. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Open up your Google Analytics account.
2. Click on “Filter Manager »” (you’ll see this beneath the list of different websites in your account, in the right-hand column) and then press “+ Add Filter”.
3. Open a new tab or new window in your browser and go to WhatsMyIP. When this loads it will say “Your IP Address is xxx”, with the “x” being numbers. Write down or copy these numbers.
4. Open the window/tab that has your Filter Manager in and add a “FILTER_NAME”. Call it something simple like “Personal IP Address” or “Work IP Address”.
5. Set up the settings to exclude an IP address and then press “save”. Your settings should look something like this: