Filtering internal traffic from Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides a wealth of useful information about a website’s visitors, but sometimes the data can be skewed by your own internal traffic on the site. For this reason it’s a good idea to create a filter which will exclude any visits from your machine from all of Google’s reports and statistics.
According to the Google Analytics support documentation, one way to accomplish this is by using JavaScript to set a cookie on all internal computers which need to be filtered out. I’ll show you how to do it using Rails 3.x below.
First add a new route for adding the cookie. My route is based off a resource I call an AnalyticsCookie so I can use the resource-style route syntax. I also prefer to add an Admin namespace to have a clear separation between forward-facing and administration areas of the site.
# Add to routes.rb
namespace :admin do
resource :analytics_cookies, :only => :new
end
Next create a new controller corresponding to the AnalyticsCookie resource. The controller will have a single action called new.
class Admin::AnalyticsCookiesController < ApplicationController
http_basic_authenticate_with :name => "admin", :password => "secret"
end
I recommend adding some sort of authentication to limit access to only authorized users. Rails 3.1 makes this quite easy to do using the http_basic_authenticate_with method. The new action will render its corresponding view template inside views/admin/analytics_cookies/ where a simple message is displayed.
h1 Cookie was added!
The last thing to do in our Rails application is add the JavaScript code to create the cookie. This is done when the HTML body element is loaded. I created a new layout file specifically for the AnalyticsCookiesController and added the JavaScript inline.
doctype 5
html
head
title Internal Traffic Cookie
= csrf_meta_tags
meta[name='robots' content='noindex']
body onLoad="javascript:_gaq.push(['_setVar', 'do_not_track_internal_traffic']);"
= yield
As you can see, the script sets a new Google Analytics cookie with the content ‘do_not_track_internal_traffic’; you can make the content anything you want.
The final step is to go to Google Analytics and create a new Filter to exclude any visitor who has the internal traffic cookie. To do this, you will need to:
- Sign in to Google Analytics and navigate to your site’s settings
- Create and name a new Custom Filter
- Set the Filter Field to “User Defined” and enter your cookie’s content (e.g.: ‘do_not_track_internal_traffic’) as the Filter Pattern
Navigate to the admin/analytics_cookies/new route using every computer you wish you exclude and you’re all set!
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Make sure that the page which sets the custom cookie also contains the standard Google Analytics code snippet
- Google Analytics will only filter out new internal traffic from its reports— previous internal traffic data will still be present.
- Slim is an HTML templating engine very similar to Haml. Check out the Slim Documentation if you have any trouble understanding the view templates.
