So, I’ve been developing on the web for several years now, but this weekend was the first time I’ve found it necessary to try to exclude my own traffic from Google Analytics. Well, actually I found it necessary to exclude a friend’s traffic from GA on his own blog.
I figured I’d need to set a custom variable on a page that would set a cookie for him when he visited it, and then filter out traffic containing that custom variable in the Google Analytics admin pages, but then I came across a much simpler and faster solution: Google provides a plugin for all major browsers that prevents the GA Javascript from sending data back to Google. Not only is this faster than mucking around with custom variables in two different places, it’s much easier for non-technical clients to implement and be confident that it’s working. All they have to do is install it.
Not exactly an amazing breakthrough, I know, but still something that I hadn’t heard of that ended up making my life a little bit easier. Here’s a link: