People get excited about their websites, whether they're a Mom posting family pics or a huge corporation like IBM. Whether they are used for fun, part of one's education, or an important business component, websites are something in which people take tremendous pride. So when a new site is launched or new pages are added, the creators want all their family and friends or all their customers and employees to log on and take a look.

But what if tracking the visitors to your site is valuable information? And what if all the extra people that come to the site are skewing that information?

And that, in fact, is the answer to the question, Why would you want to exclude your IP from your Google Analytics (GA) statistics? Actually, that's only part of the answer to only part of the question, because you may actually want to exclude a number of IP addresses from your GA stats. The visits you, your family, or your employees make to the site could completely cloud the results of you GA stats and render them useless.

Fast way for static addresses

In order to prevent your IP from inclusion, you would typically add a filter to your GA settings specifying your IP, if it was static, meaning it never changes. If you look around the Internet for advice on this you will find some people talking about scripts and code, but GA already has a built-in feature to exclude your own static IP address. In its general Settings menu, you will find a link at the bottom named "Filters Manager." Click on that, then on "Add Filter," and you can specify the filter type as "Exclude all traffic from an IP Address."

If you don't know your IP address, it is listed in your network data whether you're using a Windows, Macintosh or Linux OS (Operating System). Hit up your Help menu for how to get it. Now, this doesn't really solve the problem for the average home-site broadband user, whose Internet Service Provider (ISP) assign a different ("dynamic") IP address for every session. How do you exclude yourself from GA stats if you have a dynamic IP?

A dynamic solution

There are several ways you can exclude a dynamic IP from being counted by GA. Perhaps the easiest solution lies in the use of a cookie as opposed to filters that block IP addresses by recognition of the number sequence. The idea is to install a cookie and then use the filtering system to watch for that cookie and then ignore all the data from the computer(s) that are storing it. This way you can distribute the cookie to everyone (all your fans, all around the world, using any OS) and be assured that your friends' visits don't skew your stats.

To set this cookie you will need to make a new page on the target domain that contains the following code:

This code is needed in addition to the tracking code that should be included on the bottom of every page on your site. The next step involves visiting the site from any computer that you want excluded, so that the cookie is set. You can easily explain the procedure to your family and friends (and do it for your non-tech ones) when you send them the "cookie recipe."

The final step is to create the filter that will scan for your custom cookie and exclude the data from the cookie-holding computer. Just follow these simple steps or, if you don't find them simple, get some help from a tech-head in the office or in the neighborhood. There are lots of them around these days, thankfully.

-Enter your GA account and choose Analytics Settings.

-Click on Filter Manager.

-Choose Add Filter, which makes the Create New Filter page appear.

-Key in a Filter Name for this new filter (perhaps use "Dynamic IP filter").

-In the Filter Type drop-down list, choose Exclude.

-In the filter field, select User Defined

-For the filter pattern, select No Report

-For Make Case Sensitive, enter No.

-In the Apply Filter to Website Profiles section, choose the Available Website Profiles to which the filter should be applied.

-Click on Add to transfer selected profiles to the Selected Website Profiles list.

-Last, click on Finish to create the filter and begin applying it to the incoming data

The last detail of all is to set up all your browsers. If you use different browsers on a regular basis, you'll need to visit your newly-created "set cookie page" from each one you use. Every browser wants to store its cookies in a particular location.