Google Analytics is a free tool from Google which allows you to monitor your website traffic. Although you can see how many visitors you get overall, there are many ways to customise your Analytics account to filter the results for custom reporting. Over this and the next few blog posts we will be showing you how to use your Google Analytics account to:
- Filter your own IP from the analytics results
- Set up profiles to view organic traffic for your website
- Set up profiles to view your blog traffic
- Set up goals
- Set up Site Search and understand its benefits
- Set up ecommerce traffic
After you have followed these simple guides, you will be able to see better results based on the profiles and filters you have created. This will allow you to determine which marketing campaigns are converting better and allow you concentrate on those allowing for a more cost effective ROI.
Filter your own IP from the Analytics results
As the title suggests, filtering your own IP from the results will give you a better overview of the unique visitors that come to your site. Setting up a filter to exclude your IP is very simple. First you need to log in to your Analytics account and then choose your website profile. From here you need add a filter as shown in the image below:
On the next screen you need to click on ‘Add Filter’ as seen in the right hand corner:
You will now be shown the next screen where you need to input information for your filter. These are fairly straightforward. Input the data as follows:
FILTER_NAME: enter the name for your filter, this can be anything
Filter Type: Keep the type to the pre-defined filter
The next box needs to be ‘Exclude’ as selected from the drop down menu. The middle drop down box should be ‘traffic from the IP addresses’ and then the last one should be set to ‘that are equal to’. In the following boxes you now need to add your IP address (as in the example shown below):
Once you have entered your data, you can now add your profile (or multiple profiles) to this filter.
Then click ‘Save changes’. This filter will now be applied to the profile(s) you have selected and the IP address entered into the filter will be removed from the Analytics results and now only show unique visitors to your site.
Amir Farid
Senior SEO Programmer
