Small business website owners are sometimes skeptical about the reported number of visitors that are frequenting their website. They often wonder how many times their own visits, or visits by staff, impact their Google Analytics results. A fool proof way to eliminate one’s own visits or in-house staff visits from Google Analytics is to ‘filter’ them out of the results. Here is a step by step guide for removing, or filtering out, individual IP addresses or ranges of IP addresses from Google stats.

To remove individual IP addresses:

1. Find out what your computer IP address is
   1. Visit http://whatismyipaddress.com/ to determine your device’s IP address
   2. You can visit this site with any computer or other internet device such as an Smart Phone, iPad, etc. to determine it’s IP address.
2. Log into your Google Analytics account
3. Click the gold “Admin” button on the top right side of the horizontal navigation bar.
4. In the “Profiles” tab, select the “Filters” sub-tab.
   
5. Click the “+New Filter” button
   
6. Create a name for the filter such as “David’s CPU” or “John’s iPad”
7. In the Filter Type leave the ‘Predefined filter’ selected and select “traffic from the IP addresses” from the middle drop down menu
8. Add the IP address number into the 4 number boxes shown.
   
9. Save

To remove a range of IP addresses:

1. Find out the full range of your networked computer IP addresses
   1. A great ‘free’ tool for finding out your networked IP addresses is Radmin Remote Control: http://www.radmin.com/products/ipscanner/. This tool is malware and adware free, quick to install, easy to use and is only 6mb’s in size.
2. Log into your Google Analytics account
3. Click the “Admin” button on the top right side of the horizontal navigation bar.
4. In the “Profiles” tab, select the “Filters” sub-tab.
5. Click the “+New Filter” button
6. Create a name for the filter range to be excluded such as “All Office CPUs”
7. Select the “Custom filter” type radio button
   1. In a new window, navigate to the Google IP Address Range Tool to generate the ‘filter pattern’ that will be added to this new filter: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1034771
   2. Enter the beginning IP address and last IP address of the range to be filtered and click the “Generate RegEx” button
      
8. Copy the code that was created from the text box in step 3
9. Return to the Google Analytics page and paste the code into the “Filter Pattern” text field
   
10. Save
11. Done!

• For more “How To” technology articles visit our “How To” Articles Category.
• Need more support? Drop us a note on our website contact page.