Design, development and dollars from Tim Spangler

This is a pretty common sense tip but I imagine that many webmasters forget it when they’re settings things up, so…

A lot of webmasters use Google Analytics to track traffic and analyze visitor patterns to their sites. The tool itself is great, with tons of metrics available for comparison. The only issue is that many site owners are skewing their stats by including their own visits in their reports.

The solution is simple: block yourself! Here’s the step-by-step for Urchin/Google Analytics.

1. Log in to your Analytics account and find the link to the Filter Manager. It’s under the list of your sites.
2. Click “Add Filter” to create a new filter.
3. Give your new filter a name and set the type to Exclude all traffic from an IP address.
4. In a new tab, open WhatIsMyIP.com and copy your IP address.
5. Paste your IP into the IP address field. You don’t need to worry about adding slashes like in the example.
6. Select all of your sites that you want the change to affect under “Available Website Profiles” and click “Add.”
7. Click “Finish” to confirm the changes and enjoy your Google Analytics reports unskewed by your own traffic.

You’ll notice a small drop (dependent on how much testing you do on your sites) after you activate this change. But the benefit is that your metrics reports will be much more accurate. Remember that if you are on dialup, your IP address changes every time you dial your provider, so this solution won’t work for you.

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