Filtering out your company’s IP Addresses in Google Analytics just means your employees and businesses are not getting tracked in Google Analytics. We have some clients who stay up late in their pajamas and Google themselves until they turn blue. So we like to filter out website traffic from their team, as it can greatly skew the Google Analytics data and affect the course of a website and alter the course of a website.
So for example
You search for “your professional software”, click on your name in the search results, you visit the home page, and then leave your site, shouting hooray as you exit the website because you moved up in search rankings. You do this once or twice a week for the month checking your ranking for the same term. Additional team members do similar searches and perform similarly.
Fast forward to a month later… we are looking for ways to improve your website. We look at which keywords are converting, which ones people are diving further into the site with, and what pages they are landing on. We look at Google Analytics to get a better idea and notice a couple things: 1) Bounce rate (the % of people came to the website and left right away) for the keyword “professional copy writer” and notice it is 70% (Meaning 7 out of 10 people left the website from that keyword). We say to ourselves: “Wow that’s high, we need to fix the homepage for that keyword, or we can ignore that keyword all together”. We think this because of 1) the high bounce rate, 2) low conversions and 3) general lack in interest. Little did we know that half of these visitors were the client. Which would mean that really we only had a 35% bounce rate (which is actually pretty good) and the keyword converts at 2% instead of .5%. In fact they might convert on their second visit as they searched on that term first, then Googled “My Brand Name” for the second visit as they remembered us. So thus that keyword is actually extremely valuable. It can also happen in the opposite as well. A keyword can appear much more valuable than it actually is, all due to internal team members searching for terms that they think a potential client might search for.
So with all these searches happening and not filtering out known people, the data can easily get corrupt. This data corruption can cause quite drastic views in how we focus on website improvements, keyword focus. It can also impact other data sources such as referral sources, geographic location, and even generate more direct traffic than you actually have. So thus we filter out known IP addresses to help keep the data clean and provide better actionable insights into what to improve on your site.
Need help filtering out employee IP Addresses in your Google Analytics? Here’s how to Exclude IP Addresses via Google Analytics Help Site or Contact me today and I will see if I can help you out.