Google Analytics comes handy for blogger to analyze the daily blog traffic. There is nothing more to say about this awesome free utility. You can track your blog visitors in a various way. Where Go0gle Analytics tool helps you a lot to improve your site performance your own visits may differ the statistics of your site.
[ Read also: Exclude posts of a certain categories from WordPress blog home page ]
You own visits are not so essential for estimating your future plan. So it is always recommended that you should ignore your own visits in the Google Analytics report. I’ll introduce here some methods to exclude the your own visits from Google Analytics report.
By excluding your own IP address from the report
At first sign in to your Google Analytics account. Click on “Analytics Settings” to open the settings page. Now click on “Filter manager”. Now in the Filter manager page follow the steps:
1. Click on “Add Filter” at right side top corner.
2. Give a Filter name.
3. Chose the option “Predefined”.
4. Now under “Filter type” select “Exclude”, “traffic from the IP addresses” and the IP address range option from the drop down boxes.
5. Put your IP address.
6. Select the Website for which you want to apply the filter and click on “Add” then save the changes.
P.S – You wont see the result immediately. It normally takes 24 hrs to update the traffic report.
If you use Dynamic IP address
If you used to surf the internet connecting through wireless network or the service which provides dynamic IP addresses then the above method does not work. But you can still ignore your visits from the report using Javascript.
1. Create a page in your site.
2. Put the following code in that page
<body onLoad="javascript:pageTracker._setVar('ignore_visit');">
For WordPress blog there is no need to create new page or post. Just create a HTML page by any HTML editor and upload it in your site.
3. Visiting the page from any computer will set the cookie eligible for exclusion of your visits in Google Analytics.
4. Now visit Analytics settings > Filter manager > Add Filter
Set the settings as follows:
Filter type > Custom > Exclude.
Filter field > User defined.
Filter pattern > ignore_visit.
Case Sensitive > No.
5. Now select the website profile and click on “Add”.
6. Save the changes.
Now just visit the page from any computer. Your visit will be excluded from the Google analytics report.
If you are a site user
I personally like this method to exclude my own visit as well as of all the authors of the site. This method is very easy and gives a perfect result. Here you all need to do that put your Analytics code in your site template (generally before the </body> tag in Footer.php if you are using WordPress platform) such that it does not work if you are logged in to your site. For that just keep the Analytics code between the following conditional tag:
<?php if (!$user_ID) : ?> Your analytics code here <?php endif; ?>
This will prevent Google Analytics tool from tracking the traffic report if you are logged in to your blog dashboard.
Which method would you like to prefer?
This is awesome, thanks for sharing this trick. I was looking for this.