Exclude Internal Traffic With A Dynamic IP Address In Google Analytics

Trying to remove your traffic from Google Analytics when you have a dynamic IP address can be frustrating, but here is a great way to clear up some (if not all) of that traffic – with a custom campaign.  By using a custom campaign, we can track and remove the matching campaign traffic from our view.

Create A Custom Campaign

The first thing that you’ll want to do is create new and unique campaign variables to track internal traffic.  For our example, let’s use the following:

• Domain Name: (insert page url here)
• Campaign Source: internal
• Campaign Medium: referral
• Campaign Name: Internal Traffic

Build Your Tracking URL

Next we’ll want to create our tracking URL – we will use the URL Builder Tool to create our custom-tracked URL.  To use the tool we’ll have to also add information for the required Medium, Name, and Source fields, so fill those in as you wish.

I continued with the Internal theme for name, and since this is a referral I chose that as my source.

Create Our Filter To Ignore Internal Traffic

Our third step is to create a filter to ignore our traffic.  Inside of your Analytics, click to add a new Filter.

Analytics will only let you add one filter at a time, so let’s filter on our original variable, Campaign Source.  Select a Custom Filter Type, with your Filter Pattern of “internal”

Test Our Filter For Ignoring Internal Traffic

With our new filter saved and live, let’s open a webpage with our new campaign tagged URL, and see if we are visible in Real-time Analytics.

Great – we can see that our page views aren’t loaded in Real-Time Analytics, which means our campaign filters are properly set up.  Congrats, but there is more work to be done!  The all important final step!

Update URL’s For Bookmarks, Intranet – Everywhere!

With our new URL in hand, we need to have people start using it so that they won’t be counted in our Analytics.  It’s a good idea to update links everywhere you can – on an Intranet, staff bookmarks, a custom homepage – anywhere an internal user could click to visit our site.

Remember, this method isn’t as iron-clad as removing internal traffic from Google Analytics with an IP filter, but if we remove any portion of our internal traffic, we still have cleaner data than before.  And, we can also create a custom segment in Google Analytics with our Campaign variables to see how much traffic we are cleaning up.