This week I learned that some folks believe (and have been told) that if they set the home page of their computer to their company’s home page they will help the search engine rankings of their company website.
To be clear – visiting your company’s home page many times each day will NOT affect your search engine rankings. You may, however, artificially inflate your analytics results. So if you’re monitoring your site analytics (and you should!) you’ll see “return” visits from each of your employees each time they fire up their web browsers that are defaulted to display your company web site.
So, how can you ensure accurate web traffic analytic information? No, you don’t have to stop viewing your company web site. If you’re using an analytics tool like Google Analytics, you can filter out the results from your company’s internet connection. It’s as simple as finding out the IP address or IP range that identifies your company’s network (you probably have multiple ranges if you have multiple locations), then creating an analytics filter to filter those addresses from your results! In Google Analytics, create an exclusion filter (one of GA’s “premade” filters). Log on to GA using your administrator login, then choose “Filter Manager”. In the top right, you’ll see “Add filter” – click there. Choose “Exclude all traffic from an IP address” and select the profile you want to use. You’ll need to use regular expressions, so don’t forget the \ (escape) in front of the dots in your IP address. You may also wish to add anchors at the beginning and end of your IP if the first or last groups of numbers (octets) don’t contain three digits.
If your office has a dynamic IP address instead of a static IP or static IP range, you’ll have to do a little more work. First, create a web page that is only accessible by internal addresses. Embed a trackable cookie on that web page and have each internal user visit that page and allow the cookie. Now that each web browser in your office has the same cookie, create a filter that excludes visitors who have that “internal marker” cookie. Not as easy as simply blocking an IP range, but worth doing if you’re getting lots of web site traffic from employees. If you’re using Google Analytics, check their help section for detailed instructions on how to set the cookie.
Remember, once data is filtered, there’s no way to get back the original data – so you may wish to create a new profile that contains your location filtered data. But, filtering your site visits will provide a more accurate picture of your web traffic – and that will allow you to make better decisions about your web site and about your business.
