I need a way to remove my own traffic and interaction from my Google Analytics.
I know of all the IP and cookie based solutions but IPs can change and cookies can be erased.
One thing I did think of is that I'm always logged into my Google account and I'm always using Chrome. Is there any way to use this to my advantage? It would be really nice if I could just ignore based on my Google Account.
Browser Extensions
Use a browser extension to prevent you from being tracked on analytics. I use the Block Yourself From Analytics extensions because it allows you to configure the sites you want to prevent traffic on.
Related
We have a web service which is installed on different stations. Each has a different ip and domain. we want all of them to report to the same suite.
Can this be done?
The JavaScript tracker for Google Analytics can be used if you allow calls to the Google Servers, if you allow your clients to execute JS and either can set cookies or provide a client id in some other way (must not be personally identifiable data).
If you cannot use Javascript then you could still collect data via the measurement protocol, although this might require substantial development effort.
The domain setting in the Google Analytics interface does not affect data collection, it is used in the (soon to be removed) in-page analytics feature and as base url for the "open document" feature in the behavior reports.
Google Analytics does not collect by domain, but by property ID (UA-XXXXXXX-X), else cross-domain tracking would not be possible (it is actually a documented feature).
Cross domain tracking would be important if somebody could hop from one of your stations/domains to the other and you wanted this to be tracked as a single session. This does not seem to be your use case.
The only pitfall is that the reports display page paths, not full URIs. So if you have similar paths on all your stations the metrics for the page paths will be lumped together unless you do a breakdown by hostname. A common workaround is to add a filter to your data view that prepends the hostname to the path, or to provide custom paths in the first place.
But basically this is not a problem. If you do not need cross domain tracking you'll be okay if you dump the same tracking code in all your sites.
I need to track an intranet site's traffic and would prefer to use Google Analytics because we have several other properties already being tracked there.
Google Analytics requires a public address to set up a new property for tracking. If I create a subdomain (intranet.domain.com) to satisfy that requirement, I believe the rest should work fine. (External .js file for Google is outbound-reachable from within our network, inbound-external access is blocked to protect confidential information.)
Does anyone have experience with this situation? Can you confirm the
proposed method will work?
Will the new tracking code work from any URL, regardless of the registered property address?
Thanks!
Google Analytics records data via parameters on tracking pixel requests. You need to make sure that requests for google-analytics.com/__utm.gif will go through from your intranet. (I'm guessing it shouldn't be an issue since you said google-analytics.com/ga.js is not blocked.)
It's also not a problem using the web property ID ('UA-xxxxx-x') on different domains than it was originally created for.
I've been sniffing through my Apache log files and noticed hits which mention
FlipboardProxy/1.1; +http://flipboard.com/browserproxy
Is there a way to track/ID these users via Google Analytics so that I can understand what percentage of my visits are via Flipboard?
From what i read on flipboard:
Flipboard uses a proxy service to fetch, validate, and prepare certain
elements of websites for presentation through the Flipboard
Application.
Retrieving parts of your website to present it in flipboar, they are not actually real visits to your site.
But if you still want to track those requests in analytics then you would need to write a php that sniffs user agent and trigger a gif request to analytics.
IF they're not showing up in the Browser & OS Report; they're probably not running javascript and/or block GA.
Something along those lines might end up here. Right now it shows data at a snapshot only though.
http://ripl.io/flipboard-analytics/
I don't want to be counted as visitor every time I test my page in the hosting. Does Google know i'm the owner of the site by checking if i'm logged in my Gmail account?
I don't think Google does anything like this automatically. But they do provide instructions for excluding based on IP address (or range) and apparently also now by cookie. If you use a CMS or admin interface, you could put the code they provide in an HTML file that you then include into the admin interface pages by IFRAME (to ensure that the cookie stays set for anyone who uses that interface).
One option is to install Ghostery addon your browser. Ghostery can block trackers and scripts used on webpages likes google analytics, google adword and other adwares.
You can also block or unblock the trackers for a specific site or specific tracker for a particular site.This add on is available for Firefox and chrome browsers. If you have this installed on your browser, your visit wont be counted as google analytic script wont be executed.
You can learn more about ghostery at: http://www.ghostery.com/about
There are also often application specific ways of blocking google from counting administrators. For example I've used a wordpress analytics plugin that would automatically not include the tracking code if the user was logged in as an administrator. If you are application has the concept as admin then you could write something similar that controls when the code is added.
If you visit your site frequently from connections with a dynamic IP address, eg. home broadband, then excluding IP addresses is not particularly practical. To go beyond IP exclusion, you can create an isolated page on your site that only you know about that includes a call to Analytics to label your cookie.
The Google Analytics _setVar() function lets you label yourself with an arbitrary string, eg. 'internal'. You only need to do this once per browser as long you don't clear your cookies.
Having labelled yourself as 'internal', you can create an Advanced Segment within Google Analytics to exclude visitors with that label.
Google Analytics relay on you embedding a call to their JavaScript see this link - do not confuse it with how Google does page ranking.
So the answer to your question is that your pages should be smart enough to recognize when the request comes from you and skip the call to the JavaScript.
I have a site running Google analytics and I end up being a large fraction of the traffic to it (like 1 of the 2 hits per day). Is there any way I can set it so that my browsing doesn't skew the numbers so much? I'd be happy if it just didn't record anything for accesses that are logged in as my Google account.
Use the Filter Manager in your analytics settings
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55481&cbid=-1j8it19c4uzvt&src=cb&lev=answer
You can use filter to exclude
Traffic from a a domain
IP address
Sub directory
or you can use a custom filter. You can edit your site to set a campaign code if you login in and use the custom filter to exclude that campaign code.
You can also try out the ip filter if you use the same machine.
One option would be to use an ad blocking or javascript disabling extension in your browser to prevent google analytics from being loaded.
A neat solution is to simply stop the tracking javascript from being sent to the browser based on a cookie set on your machine. This can be done by simply adding a few lines of code to your page. Take a look at this article for a full explaination.
If you login there logged in as a site user, maybe you basing on this you just do not put the JavaScript for Google Analytics in the output HTML. This is a typical case when you are an administrator and you do not want to mess the results basing on your activities.
If you are able to touch the code that runs your site I think this is the simplest way to go.
If it is not the case, please provide some more details.