Almost everyone wants to exclude their own traffic from their Google Analytics results in order to accurately analyse and monitor the data that they are gathering. This is a pretty simple task if you have a static IP, or use a small range of IPs, but if you have a completely variable one (like me) it can be really difficult to get accurate results - especially when you’re constantly visiting your site with new updates and posts.

There are a couple of ways by which you can exclude variable URLs that I know of. One is to set a cookie in all of the browsers that you use to access the site (There are plenty of articles out there that will show you how to do this such as this one by Google). But this takes time and if you are using multiple computers it can be a bit of a pain. Also, it is possible to remove cookies by mistake in some browsers (such as Internet Explorer) which is no good either…

Another way is to use an Ad Block extension when visiting the site, however this unfortunately has the effect of blocking the analytics code of ALL the websites that you visit.

The quickest, most simple solution that I have found is to always visit my site via a referral URL. By doing this all you have to do is set up a little filter which excludes all traffic from that source. Problem solved!

The best one that I have found (which was designed with this specific use in mind) is Ref-Faker (reffaker.de).

So, just set up a bookmark in your browser’s toolbar, and remember to click that rather than go directly to your site from now on. Then, go to Google Analytics > Filter Manager > Add Filter, give it a name (i.e. Exclude My Traffic), set ‘Exclude’ ‘traffic from the domains’ ‘that are equal to’, and then add in reffaker.de to the ‘Domain’ box. Finally, apply the filter to your website profile, and Bob’s-your-uncle. Done.