How to filter out internal traffic in Google Analytics

NOTE: We understand this may be a little (too) technical. If you need ProudCity Development support, get started here.

Filtering out internal traffic in Google Analytics means excluding data generated by you, your employees, or anyone accessing your website from within your organization.

It’s important to filter out internal traffic for the following reasons:

• Accurate data: When your employees or anyone else in your organization visits your website, they can skew the data by making it seem like there are more visitors than there actually are. This makes it harder to know how many people are really visiting your website.
• Avoiding bias: If your employees are visiting your website more often than regular visitors, this can bias the data and lead to inaccurate conclusions about how well your website is doing.
• Improved analysis: When you filter out internal traffic, you get a better understanding of how your website is performing for real visitors. This can help you make better decisions about how to improve your website’s performance.

By filtering out internal traffic, you can get a more accurate picture of how your actual visitors are interacting with your website, which can help you make better decisions about how to optimize your website.

Step 1: Find your IP address

1. Go to: https://whatismyipaddress.com/
2. Copy your IPv4 IP address.

Step 2: Identify internal traffic

By completing these steps, Analytics adds a traffic_type parameter to every incoming event. You can also manually add the parameter to your events.

1. In Google Analytics, click Admin.
2. Make sure you are in the correct account and property.
3. In the Property column, click Data Streams.
4. Click a web data stream.
5. In the web stream details, click Configure tag settings.
6. Click Show all.
7. Click Define internal traffic.
8. Click Create.
9. Enter a name for the rule.
10. Enter a value for the traffic_type parameter.
    Note: traffic_type is the only event parameter for which you can define a value. internal is the default value, but you can enter a new value to represent a location from which internal traffic originates. View more documentation on creating additional traffic_types.
11. In IP address > Match type, select an operator.
    Note: “IP address equals” is the right option if your IP is formatted like this 12.123.12.12
12. In IP address > Value, enter an address or range of addresses that identify traffic from the location you identified in Step 8. You can enter IPv4 or IPv6 addresses.
13. Click Create.

Step 3: Create a data filter

1. In Google Analytics, click Admin.
2. Make sure you are in the correct account and property.
3. In the Property column, click Data Settings > Data Filters.
   Note: Data Settings is different from Data Streams from “Step 2: Identify internal traffic”.
4. Click Create Filter.
5. Choose Internal Traffic.
6. Enter a name for the data filter. The name must:
   • be unique among data filters in the same property, it’s helpful to describe the location, such as “City Hall”
   • begin with a unicode letter
   • contain only unicode letters and numbers, underscores, and spaces
   • contain up to 40 characters
7. Choose Exclude to filter out events where the value of the traffic_type parameter matches internal.
8. Choose from the following filter states:
   • Testing: Analytics identifies matching data with the Test data filter name dimension
   • Active: Analytics applies the data filter to incoming data and makes permanent changes
   • Inactive: Analytics isn’t evaluating the filter
9. Note: Your data that satisfies a test data filter is assigned to the Test data filter name dimension and given a value of the filter name. That data is available throughout Analytics in dimension pickers (for example, in your reports and explorations) so you can validate your data filters before you activate them.
10. Click Create.

Video

Resources

• [GA4] Filter out internal traffic (Google)