Semalt Expert: Why & How To Report On Internal And External Traffic In Google Analytics

When it comes to setting up a Google Analytics account, it is vital that you can distinguish the internal sources of traffic from the external sources. We usually start off by obtaining your IP address, then proceed to block internal traffic so that only the internal traffic will be displayed within the report. We may also choose to compare external traffic vs. internal traffic perhaps through setting up a variety of views and filters.

Julia Vashneva, the Senior Customer Success Manager of Semalt, presents here a compelling practice in this regard.

In order to keep your internal traffic separate from your external traffic, you have to be well aware of all of your organization's internal IP addresses. You can contact your company's IT department if you require a complete list of all internal IP addresses. This may either be a single IP address or multiple addresses for different buildings or departments.

However, if this data is not available to you, you can always determine your own IP address and those of others through the Google search 'What is my IP'. For small organizations, this is likely to be just one IP that is being utilized by all computers in the system.

If having internal traffic data analysis has no relevance to your organization and never will be, then it is advisable that you block it from all reporting data. This can be achieved through excluding internal data from your default Google Analytics view.

While making modifications to the default is a rather extreme task, it may be useful in the case that the website behavior of internal users tends to skew statistics. It is clear that internal user statistics will never be required. If you have to maintain the integrity of combined external and internal data, you will need to compare internal vs. external traffic instead.

The process to block internal traffic is quite an easy one. All you have to do is to Sign in to your Google Analytics account and visit the Admin panel. You then need to select the Account and Property for which you are intent on excluding traffic, Select Filters under the tab All Web Site Data and select New Filter.

You can name the Filter Exclude Internal Traffic. Ultimately, you select a Predefined filter, followed by Exclude and then enter your internal IP address. If you have multiple addresses to block you just have to repeat the process.

If you find it important to understand the behavior of external and internal users, it is vital that you maintain the integrity of the All Website Data view. To achieve this, all we have to do is create new views made specifically for your external and internal traffic. In this case, an internal view is created by including traffic from internal IPs. On the other hand, an external view is created by excluding all internal traffic.

Once you have set up external and internal views, you may switch between All Web Site data, external and internal views so as to ensure your reporting is thorough. To obtain access to each view, you can visit your Google Analytics Home tab. Alternatively, you may choose to jump to your view straight from the Accounts selection drop down.