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If you’ve allowed your analytics to account for every single visit, your results are likely skewed. But why on earth would you want to exclude data from potential customers? Here’s the thing: not every visit is from a customer, or even an ‘interested’ party! What about other employees of your company, and you yourself? If you’re continually allowing Google Analytics to track the number of times your internal company computers have made visits to the sites, you’re falsely skewing your results.

You’re in luck, though – Google engineers have thought ahead and given you a way to prevent these sorts of miscalculations. While the default setting on Google Analytics is to count all incoming traffic regardless of source, you have the ability to set filters for your account.

Warning: creating a filter on a website profile is irreversible. For this reason we recommend always creating a duplicate website profile and applying the filter to that one alone. Also be aware that any filters made will apply from the current time, and will NOT edit your data retroactively. Your new (duplicate) profile will also start from scratch, only counting statistics from here on out. With these exclusion filters in place, however, you'll be able to build up fresh (and more accurate!) data in no time.

Setting up filters is an easy process:

Log into your Analytics account. If you have multiple sub-accounts, click on the “Name” (e.g., Whereoware) of the one for which you’d like to create a filter.   Create the aforementioned duplicate website profile, so as not to permanently alter current profiles! To do this, go to the Overview >> Account page of your Google Analytics, and select “+Add new profile” across from the URL website in question (found under the "Actions" column of the Website Profiles table). Name your new profile in a way that will indicate it involves a filter. For example, we might use "Whereoware Internal Company Filter".   Below the bottom right of the table that displays your “Website Profiles,” click on “Filter Manager” (if you’ve previously completed this step/set up filters, the text below will state how many filters have been set up for this account. You can go back and edit these filters later).

4. The resultant page will show you a table of your “Existing Filters”. To add a new filter, click the “+ Add Filter” hyperlink in the top right hand corner.

5. Fill out the provided form:

• Type a unique name for this filter (Internal Whereoware Filter, etc)
• Select “Predefined” filter
• Under “Filter Type,” assign things based on your end goal; if you’re trying to discount any visits from your marketing manager, for example, you might select “Exclude >> traffic from the IP addresses >> that are equal to”
• Fill out any requested information (in this example, you would enter the IP address)

6. Select which website profile on your account you would like to apply this filter to (by highlighting and then clicking Add or Remove), and then click “Save Changes”. Your filter will appear in the Existing Filters table.

A final note: more information on creating custom (not predetermined) filters can be found here.

Good luck, and happy filtering!