: Filtering your own IP's in Google Analytics, good or bad idea? Is it a good idea to filter our own IP addresses from our own websites in Google Analytics? On the one hand, the data is "real"

@Cugini213

Personally I think that you should opt out of the statistics on your development machines, at least in your debugging browser (Firefox) or your quick-add-content browser (Chrome) but not on your real-user-test-browser (IE).

The best way to do it is with the plugin that Google provide so that you never register on analytics, with your own site or anyone else's:


Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on (BETA)

To provide website visitors more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics, we have developed the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. The add-on communicates with the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js) to indicate that information about the website visit should not be sent to Google Analytics.

If you want to opt-out, download and install the add-on for your current web browser. The Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on is available for Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera.

tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

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@Sarah324

Google does not use traffic to rank web pages.

But you should still filter your IP address out of Google Analtyics if your goal is to have accurate statistics as to how many users you have and how they are using your site. You're only fooling yourself if you count your own visits in your site statistics.

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@Gloria169

Generally speaking yes you want to filter your own IP so you get better results. But testing Analytics can be tough. Sometimes we need to test a funnel or something complex and we need to generate the data ourselves so we need our company IP on.

There really isn't a right or wrong answer here.

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@Goswami781

Yes! If the number of visits to your sites increased your brownie points (or search engine ranking) then we'd all find ways of increasing our visits through automatic clicking scripts and Google would stop using visits as a measure of popularity.

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