Recently I have noticed several Google Analytics accounts setup incorrectly and although this is a pretty basic tip, it’s pretty important and worthy of a post.

In Google Analytics admins have the ability to set filters to exclude an IP address (or range of IP’s, domains, etc) from reports.  By excluding your own generated traffic, the filters help limit numbers from being skewed and increase visitor tracking accuracy.

Unfortunately what I am noticing is that filters are being used differentiate the excluded data from the reports but in reality it’s overlooking that data all together.  Once raw data has passed through the filters, Google cannot go back and reprocess the data.

So how do you exclude IP addresses from your reports in Google Analytics while sustaining the data?  Add another profile for an existing domain.  For example if we were starting from scratch I would setup two profiles (profile A “UA-XXXXX-1“  &  profile B “UA-XXXXX-2“) under my Google Analytics account.  I would assign no filters under profile A “UA-XXXXX-1” and assign the IP exclusions on profile B “UA-XXXXX-2“.  Both retrieve data from the same tracking code off my site so no other steps are needed.

Now when I log into Google Analytics I can select profile A “UA-XXXXX-1” and view unfiltered reports then select profile B “UA-XXXXX-2” and view the same results, filtered.

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