How to Remove Personal or Employee Info From Google Analytics

This is Jared with Carbon Digital and today we’re talking about Google Analytics and how to exclude either logged in users or either your actual access to the website itself. To exclude Google Analytics traffic, we're going to be using filters.

Failure to exclude Google Analytics traffic for yourself, or employees, can result in false data. Realistically, it will give you the impression that your visitors and their actions are higher than reality. So, it's important to exclude your team from the data.

Don't have Google Analytics already setup?

If you haven't already setup Google Analytics on your website, don't worry. It's a fairly simple process. You can check out or other videos on how to setup Google Analytics on the following website platforms:

• WordPress
• Shopify
• HTML/custom code

Once you've added Google Analytics tracking to your website, you can come back here to learn how to exclude Google Analytics traffic for your team!

Problem: Inflated Traffic Data

exclude google analytics traffic wordpress dashboard analytics

So, you can see here we’re on a website, it’s actually the Carbon Digital website. We're currently using WordPress, and here in the bottom right, it shows that we have a few different countries with some regular traffic to our website.

In the top right corner you can see that there are 147 page visits in the past 30 days. We don’t do much marketing or advertising so It’s going to make things interesting for sure when we review our numbers after exclude Google Analytics traffic for our team.

Getting Started to Exclude Google Analytics Traffic

We want to make sure that our traffic isn’t actively messing up the Google Analytics data. You're in luck because there is a very simple fix for this. So, what we do is we go into Google Analytics and create "filters".

Filters allow us to include or exclude Google Analytics traffic using specific pieces of information based on specific criteria. The three things that we will be excluding today are:

• Our personal traffic to our website.
• The WordPress login page
• The WordPress logged in Uniform Resource Locator (URL) sub-directory

Google Analytics Home Dashboard Page

Once logged into Google Analytics, you'll be on the home page dashboard. From the home page here, on the bottom right hand side we’re going to click on admin.

exclude google analytics traffic home page

Google Analytics Admin Page

And so, you can either access the filters through the main panel on the left side, or you can go to the actual view on the right-hand side and click on filters.

exclude google analytics traffic admin page

Please note that this is solely for the "view" that you have selected. Also, note the following for the columns in the admin page.

• Left Column: This is for the account you're using.
• Center Column: This is for the "property". If you have multiple websites, you can track them individually with properties.
• Right Column: This is for the view. If you wanted to track different types of data for a website, you can segregate the data into different views.

Google Analytics Filters Page

Once you are on the filters page, you can see that there will be a list of active filters here. It's here that we will establish the rules to exclude Google Analytics traffic.

So, I have already created a filter for my custom login URL here, so we have set the exclude Google Analytics traffic for this custom login page. And now what we’re going to do is we’re going to add our IP address.

excluse google analytics traffic filters view

For reference, the Internet Protocol (IP) address is basically like a street address for your computer.

Finding your IP address is actually quite simple. We will need the IP address to exclude Google Analytics traffic for an individual user. If you go to Google, you can simply search for “what is my IP”. In the search results, there is a box at the top of the search results that show you. Boom!

*Note*: While IP addresses are considered public information, it's a best practice to keep these secure. Which is why we aren't showing our IP.

So, just copy that number and navigate back to Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Creating a Filter

We’re going to add a new filter by clicking on "Add Filter". The first thing to do is to enter the filter name. We’ll call this one “Remove Jared’s Traffic”. Then, under the Predefined filter type, select the following:

• Exclude
• traffic from the IP address
• that are equal to

Then you can simply paste in your IP address into to the text box. Once you complete that you can click Save.

excluse google analytics traffic create new filter

So, now Google Analytics isn’t going to capture any traffic from me going to my own website. How crazy is that?!?!?! That's the power we have when we exclude Google Analytics traffic.

Are you tracking internal URLs?

Another piece that’s highly important to identify is whether or not you're tracking internal URLs. For websites that are built on a Content Management System (CMS), when you login to your website, the URLs are known to change.

For example, when you login to a WordPress website, all of the admin / dashboard pages show your domain followed by "/wp-admin/" and possibly more.

These are internal subdirectory URLs, and in most cases you don't want to track these, so we will definitely want to exclude Google Analytics traffic for these URLs. There are instances where you want to track a logged in user, but it's specific to your website structure.

For example, if you have a membership site, and you're looking to improve the User Interface (UI) / User Experience (UX) then you could track internal pages to gain insight. In these cases you wouldn't want to exclude Google Analytics traffic for all logged in users. You'd want to be laser specific.

So, if you don’t have a need for tracking internal URLs for customer traffic, and it's just employees / contractors / freelancers, then you want to add this next filter.

Exclude WordPress Admin URLs

exclude google analytics traffic filters view 2

Click on the “Add Filter” button. This time we're going to input the following info to exclude Google Analytics tracking data:

• Filter name: Remove Logged in Users
• Exclude
• traffic to the subdirectories
• that contain

I like to use "contain" here just to make sure that we capture everything that could come up in the future. Next we're going to add the subdirectory

For example, we’re using a WordPress website. So, when you’re logged in, you’ll see that in the URL bar it has your URL, then “wp-admin”. So, what we’re going to do is take “wp-admin” and add it between two slashes like what is currently highlighted in the image below. This will exclude Google Analytics traffic for all logged in users.

exclude google analytics traffic wordpress admin urls

Once you've entered that (see image below) you can click on the save button.

exclude google analytics traffic create filters 2

So now, Google Analytics will no longer track any users that are logged into the website. Awesome! Let's continue to exclude Google Analytics traffic for WordPress URLs that we don't want to track.

Excluding WordPress Default Login URL

Another thing you’re going to come across, for WordPress specifically, is the login page. By default, the WordPress login page is your domain, then "/wp-login.php".

exclude google analytics traffic filters page 3

Click on the "Add Filter" button, and let's get started adding a new filter.

This time, we're going to add a custom filter. We're going to call this filter “Remove Login Page”. Under the custom filter type, select “Request URI”. In the Filter Pattern box, type in “wp-login.php” and click save. NOICE.

exclude google analytics traffic create filter 3

So right out of the gate there that’s going to exclude our login page, our logged in users and our personal traffic. This process can be repeated as many times as needed for you to exclude Google Analytics traffic, based on your website and requirements.

Watch on YouTube

This is just a general video to sop tracking your employee data and your personal data with Google Analytics. When you exclude Google Analytics traffic for your team, you are making a contentious effort to gain accurate insights. And so, from this point moving forward, Google Analytics itself is not going to track that information anymore. That’s very useful, and very critical to the overall success of your data integrity.