Weekly Tip: What's my IP?

One great feature about Google Analytics is the ability to filter out your internal traffic from reports.

The most common way to do this is to set up a filter in the admin that filters out the IP address of your company:

It's very important to keep these up to date to ensure your data stays accurate.

Did your company recently move? Did you open a new office in a different city? These are a couple of scenarios that may indicate that you need to revise or add filters.

You may also want to filter out traffic coming from your web or search vendors if they spend a lot of time on your site.

To find out what your IP address is, go to www.whatismyip.com or ask your IT manager.

Bonus Tip: Annotations

The annotation functionality is another great feature available in your reporting interface. When a change or event has taken place that may affect your reports, make a note of it in the annotations section:

This will enable you to quickly analyze your traffic a year from now without having to rack your brain on why your traffic spiked or fell all of a sudden.

Great reasons to annotate include: adding or revising a filter, launching a new site or section of your site, big advertising push, putting advertising on hold, etc.