Excluding internal traffic from Google Analytics 4 is recommended for a few reasons:
- Accurate reporting: When analyzing website traffic, you want to make sure that the data you’re seeing reflects the behavior of actual users, rather than your own activity. Including internal traffic can skew your data, making it harder to get an accurate understanding of your website’s performance.
- Avoiding biases: As an internal user, you may interact with the website in different ways than an external user would. For example, you might spend more time on certain pages, or repeatedly visit the same pages. This can create biases in your data and give you an inaccurate understanding of user behavior.
- Better decision making: By excluding internal traffic, you can get a more accurate picture of how external users interact with your website. This can help you make better decisions about how to optimize your site and improve the user experience.
To exclude internal traffic from GA4, you can use a filter to exclude traffic from specific IP addresses, or use Google Tag Manager. This will ensure that your data is as accurate as possible and free of internal biases. The easiest way to exclude internal traffic is through IP address filters in GA4. But keep in mind that some IP addresses are not static but dynamic.
It is a 2 step process:
1) Create a filter on IP addresses
Admin > Property > Data streams > Click on domain > Configure tag settings > Show all > Define internal traffic >> add IP address(es) and name the filter (e.g. Internal traffic)
You can easily find you own IP address typing “what is my ip” in Google search.
Note: Enabled filter can block debug view in GA4.
2) Enable the filter
Admin > Property > Data Settings > Data Filters >> add a new filter and choose the name we chose in step #1
Here we can choose whether we want to test the filter or directly activate/deactivate it.
