This solution doesn’t work with Google’s new (2010) asynchronous code snippet. I’m working on a solution.
If you’re doing frequent work on your website, there’s a good chance your biggest visitor is the person who greets you in the mirror every morning.
So?
Image by striatic via Flickr creative commons
So if you’re not excluding your visits from Google Analytics, you’re creating some crazy data.
Now, it’s a given that your analytics data is never perfect, but if you’re throwing it off by 1, 2, 5 or 10%, you’re not doing yourself any favors.
Luckily, there are several reasonably easy ways to remove your own visits from analytics.
I’ve got my favorite, which I’ll share here. It’s not the only way. For example, you can exclude by IP address. This works well if you’re always connected from the same place (like work). It doesn’t work too well for me, though, because not only can I not figure out my IP address, but I’m often working from home or coffee shops.
My choice is to exclude my visits based on cookies I set in my browsers.
Three steps:
1. create a filter to block your visits.
2. create a special web page to set a cookie in your browser (not as hard as it sounds).
3. visit that page in all the browsers and from all the computers you use.
Ready to dive in?
Watch this video, then open the sample html file and download the screenshots.
If you need a refresher on the settings they are:
- name of your choosing
- custom filter
- exclude
- dropdown to “user defined”
- pattern of your choice: no spaces or quotes/apostrophes
- not case sensitive
- add your profile to right hand box
- save
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Questions? Ask them in the comments!
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{ 17 comments }
Useful tip – I’ve got excited before by the fact a visitor spent 3 hours on my site, only to find it was me when I checked the IP address.
Yes, and if you do have a static IP address, excluding your visits is a lot simpler. But few people I know both have one and know that they do, so I prefer this method.
Useful tip. How do I find the cookie to see if it is there?
@Jim: I found it when I searched my cookies for the website name. In my browser I see a name column, which shows “_utmv” and then a value that includes the user defined value.
I didn’t digged too much to find out that using a cookie will work better for me, so thanks for showing me this.
By any chance, do you know if it will exclude your earlier visits, too?
Really valuable. Thanks!
I haven’t figured out a way to block earlier visits yet. But I haven’t really looked. Too much trouble!
Your PDF is damaged.
Thanks for letting me know. I’ve replaced it with a copy that works. I can email you a copy if your browser won’t get the new one (I had to switch browsers to test the new file).
Joe, thanks for this roadmap. I knew it was something I needed to do, but never took the time to find out how. You’ve saved me a lot of time.
Glad it helped, Clesha!
Awesome, thanks for this post Joe! I am bookmarking this. I just set up GA and I need to get this done. I used it before and tried to block myself, but I guess I didn’t do it right because I still always saw my stats there.
Hey, nice tip, thanks! That’s really useful. Yeah, I get funny traffic spikes on weekends sometimes, and get all excited until I realise it’s because I was working on the site. Heh.
I could never have figured out this kind of cookie cleverness on my own. You’re a hero.
Thank you so much Joe for this very easy tutorial. I was so confused after reading the Google Analytics help so it was great to come across this
I couldn’t seem to get the .zip file to download so just clicked on the link above the video and viewed (then copied) the page source code which worked a treat.
Thanks again!
Abbey
Thanks for letting me know about the download problem. I’ll look into it. Probably from changing servers. Glad the guide was helpful.
Aha. I think I may have solved my own problem, but I wanted to ask first.
I recently launched a new website, and installed analytics code by following the steps for creating a new profile. When I was adding your code above, the cookie would never get set, and upon further investigation discovered that it was generating an error.
Then I noticed a blog entry in the Google Analytics blog about the Asynchronous Code being released and noticed a link to the older code. When I clicked on the link for the older code, I noticed the “pageTracker.” object was in there and it’s not in the new asynchronous code (which was the error I was getting, “ReferenceError: Can’t find variable: pageTracker”)
Is there an updated version of this idea that works with Google’s new asynchronous code?
Jeff– I haven’t installed the asynchronous code yet, but from your comment it sounds like it’s breaking my method. Ah, progress. I’ll work on changing the instructions once I work it out.
thanks for this step-by-step . . . hopefully I’ll get it to work
it’s kinda surprising google doesn’t have a simple EXCLUDE ME button like statcounter and others do
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