I am a big advocate of using Google Analytics, OK sometimes it isn’t the friendliest of analytics packages to use, but spend some time with it and you will soon see it is packed with useful information about what your visitors do on your website, where they click, where the hot-spots are, your top content and completed goals (plus so much more to boot!)
A great alternative is Clicky Web Analytics within the stats section of the control panel you can easily ad IP addresses to either track regular visitors/commeters on your websites OR use their feature where you can set a cookie so that your visits are not logged to the websites regardless of your IP. For each PC/Tablet/Laptop you have you will need to set this cookie. It also enables you (if an agency) to send clients to a page where they can also set a cookie to not track their vists if you so wish.
One aspect that skews your analytics stats is visits from you, checking your site, previewing pages etc which doesn’t give you a true view of actual visitors are doing (pay attention, this next bit applies to your webmaster too!)
I’m going to show you how to block your IP address (and your webmasters/SEO’s) from showing up in your analytics so Google will ignore those visits and not record them.
- Log-in to your analytics package and click on the website profile you wish to block your IP from.
- You will get a screen with the domains in that profile and to the bottom right hand side of this you will see “Filter Manager” (see below).
- Now select “Add Filter” (see below).
- You will now get a screen that looks like this (see below).
- Name the filter (My IP Address will do) and select “traffic from the IP addresses” in the drop down list (see below).
- Enter your IP address – if you don’t know what it is go to whatismyaddress.com which should give you an indication of what your IP address is (you may or may not have a static IP address, it could be that yours is within a range, in which case you will need to assign that range, this may exclude other visitors from your analytics too). You also need to be aware that if you use a laptop in various places across the UK your IP address will change, so for the purpose of this exercise use the location IP of where you are the most when you visit your site.
- Add the website profiles you wish to apply this to.
- Click “Save” and you have completed your filter (see below).
- You can also use the Filter Manager for other useful blocks i.e. blocking spam domain visits from your site like golbnet and brasilblogspot.
- It is also a good idea to block your webmasters visits too as they may be the one visiting the site the most (this will put your returning visitors, time on site and content analytics (as well as keywords used) out of sync).
*Bare in mind that Google Analytics does not show approximately 1/3rd of visitors to your website as it runs on JavaScript. There are other analytics packages available that can be run in harmony with your GA package. Some may be provided by your web host.*
I hope you have found this post useful, if you have any comments please use the comment box below. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me. If you would like Google Analytics installed please use the contact form and get in touch!
