Web analytics are an important tool to any Webmaster, blogger or anyone that does business on the Internet. You can use web analytics to track a lot of things. It is astonishing to me how many still don’t use web analytics.
One of the most popular and free web analytics solutions is Google Analytics. All you need is a Google account and a few minutes to set up web reporting for your site. There are no programs to install, just a piece of code to add to the footer of your web site.
I use Google Analytics for just about all my blogs and web sites. I am experimenting with other packages but Google is still my primary web reporting package.
There is one tweak you need to make to your account in the beginning: filter out internal addresses. Internal addresses include yourself or anyone else working on the site. When you filter out internal addresses, you will get an improved view of the statistics for your site.
Just follow these simple steps to exclude an address from Google Analytics:
- Find your IP address.
- Login to your Google Analytics account.
- Click on Analytics Settings.
- At the bottom of the page, select filter manager.
- Click on the add filter link.
- Create a name for your filter.
- Select predefined filter.
- Select the drop-downs to show exclude traffic from the IP addresses that are equal to.
- Enter the IP address you looked up earlier. You can also exclude a block of IP addresses or domain names.
- Select your site from the available website profiles.
- Click the add button, this will add your site to the selected website profiles.
- Click save changes.
From now on, visits from your IP address will not show up in future traffic reports.
What types of web reporting do you use on your site? Do you exclude yourself from the reports?
Photo credit: kevinzhengli
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