Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

Amanda just wrote about how to find out what your IP address; but how do you go about excluding your traffic from your Google Analytics reports? With the old version of GA I knew how to input my IP address so it would get filtered in the reports;  but for some reason I couldn’t quite figure out how to do this in the new version. Thanks to a smart colleague (ahem, Monica) she pointed it out to me and I thought I’d “pay it forward” and show you!

Click on any of the images below for a closer view.

1. After you’re logged into your Google Analytics account and have selected your account you’ll see a little gear looking icon in the upper right hand corner. Like in the image to the right. This will take you to the settings for that GA account; this is also where you can set up assets like Custom Alerts, Goals, and Users.
2. You want to make sure that you’re looking at the “Profiles” which is the top tab in this section, then select Filters. This is where you can add, remove, and edit filters on your Google Analytics account. If you’re setting up filters for the first time, choose “+ New Filter.” Indicate whether you are creating a new filter for a profile or applying an existing filter to a profile.
3. The next steps are very easy – give your filter a name (you might want to filter home traffic and office traffic; this is a good place to note which is which), select filter type (it’s probably predefined), and then choose “Exclude,” “traffic from the IP addresses,” and “that are equal to” from the drop downs. This is where you put in your IP address! Click “Save” and voilà you have just filtered out your IP traffic from Google Analytics reports!

Pro tip!

Once you’ve filtered your traffic you should make an Annotation in Google Analytics. That way, if someone else is looking at your site metrics and they notice that traffic has dropped some in the last month, they can see that there is an annotation that reads, “Filtered out office IP traffic from reports” and be able to attribute that decline more easily. I try to get in the habit of making annotations whenever something significant may have changed on the site or that may affect the reports.

Each computer or device that communicates over the internet has a numerical label assigned to it – your IP address. This way your computer can be distinguished from everyone else. Think of it as your computer’s phone number.

You may need your IP address to set up a firewall, or sync a device or program to your computer. It is also handy to know so you can exclude your IP address from your Google Analytics results. By excluding your IP address you will block any data from your office network and get a more true picture of your website’s results.

There are lots of ways to figure out your IP address….

Jenika likes IP Chicken, but let’s be honest… she probably just likes the chicken.

Matt, on the other hand, likes the new Google feature where if you Google the phrase ‘IP address’, it will show your IP address above the search results.

Hope that helps! Got this question twice this week!

We talked a lot about mobile last year and we’re probably going to talk about it even more this year. Hopefully you’re all okay with that and hopefully you took our advice and reviewed the mobile visitors on your website and maybe even considered using a mobile site. Did you see what Google Analytics is doing with mobile analytics now? They are showing you the actual device that your site visitors used to browse your site.

Why does this matter?

There are so many devices that use different screen sizes and offer different browsing experiences. It’s a lot to keep up with! The more you understand about the types of devices people are using to visit your site, the better you can improve your mobile site to give them a good user experience. Of course there is always responsive design, which allows you to cater your website to all mobile and tablet devices. However, you may still want to give your mobile visitors a unique mobile experience when interacting with your business website. So, if you do have a mobile site, you can use the information in Google Analytics to customize their interaction. Not only will the device type help you understand how they are browsing but it also gives you some insight as to who is browsing. For example, if you have a higher number of Blackberry visits than iPhone visits, what can you learn about the people browsing your site?

Other cool mobile reporting

Not only can you see the device, you can see who their service providers are and “Mobile Input Selector” tells you if they are using a touchscreen, a click wheel, or another method to select information using their mobile device. You can also see top screen resolutions in a simple report format.

It can be intimidating to try to accommodate so many different resolutions and device types but, there are lots of tools to help you see how your website looks on different devices.

(I think) This is the third year in a row dubbed as “the year of mobile” so you should all be ready for this by now. I know I am interested to see what happens in the mobile world this year – how voice search changes mobile browsing and how that will affect mobile advertising.

I am always intrigued to learn new and creative ways that businesses/brands are using mobile marketing. Is it to nerdy to say that I’m excited to see what mobile will bring to us this year? Oh well, it’s true, bring it on 2012!

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

I am going to bypass the first 17 tips on why Google+ is important to get us straight to this one. This is an important fact, and I’m sure many haven’t seen it .

Did you know that you can see how Google connects you socially with your contacts? Google combines your Google contacts, contacts via connected accounts (for example, if you have your Twitter account linked to your Google profile), and secondary connections, and uses this network of Google contacts who have a profile in order to deliver more relevant search results.

Anyone can see their own list if you’re logged into Google, just go here, you’ll see something similar to what you see below. This is my own personal social data, so you can see how socially active my friends are. At least my friends that begin with the letter “A”.

Drilling down a little deeper, I can see how Amanda has been sharing content, as well as how her Google profile is linked to other profiles.

Seeing expanded views of social sharing like this demonstrates a bit how Google+ Circles and Ripples work. As more and more people start using Google+ these connections are going to expand dramatically, providing insightful social value to search results. And ads – don’t forget the ads.

One moment, you say you are still on the fence on how Google+ may influence your search results?

To translate what Lauren from google just said – yes, +1 & Google+ pages for brands will become a significant ranking factor #mpsis

— elisabeth osmeloski (@elisabethos) December 10, 2011

(Lauren Kelley, Social Media Lead for Google+, Mediapost Search Insider Summit, 12/10/11)

That should clear thing up enough to get you started.

You can learn more about Google’s social search here:

Read more from our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series!