How to filter out internal traffic?

Google Analytics 4 isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and it wouldn’t be wrong to say that people are having a hard time understanding. In fact, some people are saying that they miss Universal Analytics because it makes it a breeze to filter out the traffic. That’s because it used to provide full control over traffic filtration, so it was a work of a few minutes.

However, now, GA4 is the only available option, and we are sharing how you can filter out internal traffic with its help!

Understanding GA4 & Internal Traffic

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has integrated the IP-based role, but it’s not working out for remote employees because of dynamic IPs. In addition, companies cannot really update their IP lists on a regular basis because it’s not practical.
As far as internal traffic is concerned, it’s the web traffic that comes from the company’s employees who are accessing the website. This activity can reduce the data quality and make it challenging to understand the end-user activity.

Filtering Out The Internal Traffic

Filtering the internal traffic helps ensure that you’ve data on the end user activity because you will be able to exclude employees’ IP addresses from the report. So, make sure you have the role of an editor to make sure you filter out the traffic. In addition, the editor role is important for creating, editing, and deleting the data filters. Now, let’s check out the step-by-step instructions!

1. First of all, you have to open the Google Analytics page by clicking this link https://www.google.com/analytics/web and tap on the “admin” button. You must be using the correct property and account for this work.
2. Go to the “property” option, click on the data streams, and choose the web data streams.
3. On this page, you’ve to tap on “configure tag settings” and click on the show all button.
4. From this page, you’ve to click on “define internal traffic” and tap on the create button. After this, you’ve to enter the rule’s name as well as the value for traffic_type.
5. On the IP address field, tap on “match type” and choose an operator. In the case of the value, you’ve to add the addresses that can identify traffic from your selected location. The good thing is that you can add IPv4 as well as IPv6 addresses. In case you don’t know the public IP address, click on “What’s my IP address?”
6. The next step is to add a condition and tap on the Create button.

This means that you’ve created the condition, and now it’s time to create a data filter. For this purpose, we recommend following the below-mentioned steps;

1. Open the admin page on Google Analytics and open the data settings from the property page.
2. Then, you have to open the data filters and tap on the “create filter” button. From this page, you’ve to click on the “internal traffic” button.
3. The next step is to add the data filter’s name and select the “exclude” button to filter out the event where condition or traffic_type matches the name.
4. As far as the filter states are concerned, you can choose between testing, active, and inactive. Once done, tap the “create” button, and you are done!

So, are you ready to filter out the traffic now?