I’ve seen many extensive articles on how to exclude fake hits that show in your Google Analytics profile and they work great, but they are very time consuming if you have a lot of sites. I recently found a quick way to filter out bots using a built-in feature by Google. I wasn’t aware of this until I added my IP in the exclude list. Here are the two quick steps I took to exclude you own traffic and known bots without spending too much time:
Exclude Yourself From Google Analytics Traffic
- Go to your Analytics property admin > view > filters
- Click add filter
- Name it whatever you would like
- Filter type > exclude
- Select source or destination > traffic from ip address
- Select > that are equal to
- Enter you IP address. Google “My IP” if you don’t know how to look it up
- Done!
Now your own traffic won’t appear on your site or your client’s site. This is great for making sure your traffic numbers aren’t bulked up by your own visits.
Exclude Robots from Google Analytics
- Go to view > View Settings
- Check the box under Bot Filtering: Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders
There you have it. Now, we can use the options that Google has built in to quickly filter some bogus traffic to your site. They didn’t have this option in the past, so it’s nice to see them finally implement it. I wish we could see a list or be able to modify if necessary, but I guess that’s what the custom excludes and filtering are for! I haven’t analyzed a site with heavy spam traffic to see the difference yet. If any of you have noticed a difference, let us know in the comments.