Filtering out internal traffic from your website data is one of the most common settings made in web analytics tools. The reason why this is so common is that you don't want to mix internal data with external data when doing analyses. The internal traffic often has no value when doing an analysis of how potential customers and other stakeholders interact with the website.
This is especially important to keep in mind if you are, for example, testing different features of a website or launching a new website as this often contributes to a lot of internal traffic.
If you've just switched from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) or just set up GA4, here's a quick guide on how to filter internal traffic.
Step 1.
Open up GA4 and open up the left menu and click on Administrator at the bottom left.
Step 2.
Under your GA4 property, click on Data Streams.
Step 3.
Click on your data stream for the website in this case our website contitude.com
Step 4.
When you reach your data stream, scroll down the page and click on "Configure tag settings".
Step 5.
At the bottom of the Google tag page, click on "view all"
Step 6.
Click on "define internal traffic".
Step 7
Click create to create an internal traffic rule
Step 8.
Enter a name for the rule. If you have many different IP addresses to be filtered for internal traffic, it is a good idea to name the rules something you remember. For example, the Stockholm office and the Malmö office.
Then enter your IP number. If you are in the office you want to filter traffic from, you can get your IP number by Googling "Whats is my IP" or clicking on the link here: what is my ip-address
NOTE, you need to end the IP number with "/24" if your IP number follows the structure below. If instead it has the IPv6 format that looks like this: 2001:db8:: end with "/48"
When you're done, it will probably look something like this:
When you're done, click Create.
Step 9.
Now that you have created a rule for internal traffic, you need to choose if you want to filter out this data from GA4.
Then go back to the admin view and choose "data filters" which you will find in a dropdown menu under "Data settings"
Step 10
There you will initially find a default filter for internal traffic. But under current status it says "Testing". This means that GA4 is evaluating your filter and collecting the results in a report.
Step 11.
If you feel confident that it is set up correctly, which it should be if you have followed this guide, you can instead change from Testing mode to Active.
Then click on the filter row and you will get to the view below where you click on Active.
Then all the data according to your rule will be filtered out.
Well done! Now you're done.
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