Filtering staff sessions out of Google Analytics data?

[PaulSteinbrueck]

Google Analytics has the capability to filter our staff's sessions out of our Google Analytics data by IP address. This seems pretty important so that our staff doesn't distort our GA data. So when someone's IP changes, they send their new IP to the team member who is responsible for manually going into GA and changing their IP in the filter. This was pretty simple when our team was just a handful of people whose IPs rarely changed. But now we have 10+ members of our team living all over the world, some of whom use mobile hotspots that changes their IP multiple times a day.

Do you filter staff IPs in Google Analytics?

If so, how do you manage this?

 

[ElizabethRule]

You can create a custom regex using this tool => IP Address Regular Expressions Generator for Google Analytics

Copy the regex and put it into a filter Custom > Exclude > IP Address

You should be able to fit all 10 IPs in one filter (its a 250 character limit). As you get more employees, you will need to add a second filter.

 

[PaulSteinbrueck]

Hi Elizabeth, thanks for the reply. To clarify, the issue isn't filtering 10 IPS - we know how to do that - the issue is that the IPs are changing frequently which means we're spending a lot of time checking IPs, notifying the person responsible for managing the filter, and then that person updating the filter.

 

[Conor Treacy]

Hi Paul,

We filter at the site level, before the analytics code is even triggered.

Easier to do with WordPress as users are logged in, and any of that particular role are then filtered so that it doesn't trigger analytics.

We also maintain a site that is not WordPress and we created some PHP to handle things for them. Essentially, we created an employee portal that employees must be logged into before being on the site. When they access the portal, it stores that IP address in a database. When we trigger Google Analytics, it looks up the IP against that database and if the IP is there, it doesn't trigger.

While we did all of ours in a database, you could use a Google Sheet or something too - possibly use Google Data Studio and check from that end before triggering analytics call.

We have also done the filtering by IP in the past, but management can be a pain with lots of employees as you mentioned.

There's no EASY filtering method unless they're all accessing via a VPN and then you can filter from that.