Better Stats with Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great resource for web developers, SEO experts or website owners interested in web marketing. This online tool lets you track visits to your website and shows you the actions of site visitors in minute detail.

However, results may be skewed if Google Analytics is counting hits by you the site owner or developer. For example, a web developer is likely to cause multiple page loads when updating or testing a website, but we don’t want these results to give us false positives in our analytics tool. Therefore it is important to ensure that site activity by the website developer or owner is not tracked.

Google Analytics gives us an easy way of doing this. Firstly we must login to Google Analytics and edit the appropriate website profile.

Now we can add a filter to block our hits from our own IP address from being counted. (Not sure what your IP address is? See whatismyipaddress.com).

Click on the Add Filter + link and choose the Add new filter for profile radiobutton.

Enter an appropriate filter name and click the Predefined Filter radiobutton.

Using the drop-down menus select Exclude – traffic from the IP addresses – that are equal to. Now enter your IP address in the space provided.

This handy tip ensures that your site visits don’t cloud the reality of how your site is performing.

Interested in getting more visitors to your website?

I have undertaken Search Engine Optimisation and paid ad campaigns (pay-per-click) for many Irish businesses achieving excellent Return on Investment. Contact me today to find out more.