Vent: I just discovered my analytics were tracking my own visits for 6 months

Ngl I was looking at my site stats last week and saw this weird spike in traffic from my own IP address. Turns out I forgot to exclude my office wifi and home connection when I set up Google Analytics back in January. Has anyone else accidentally inflated their own numbers like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

olivia_chen3512d ago

Does it feel like we're all just accidentally messing up our own data all the time? I've caught myself double counting stuff in my personal budget spreadsheet because I logged the same grocery trip on two different days, and then wondered why my "eating out" category was suddenly through the roof. It's like we set up all these systems to track things, but we forget that we're also part of the system messing it up. Cleaning out old data feels like finding out your fridge has been running with the door slightly open for months, just wasting your time and energy.

pipera5014d ago

Set up a filter in the admin panel right now. Go to Admin > View > Filters and add one that excludes your main IP and any VPN you use. I learned the hard way when I thought my new blog post was getting 500 hits in an hour from Reddit but it was just me refreshing to check the comments. Also filter out your home wifi IP if you work from home sometimes. Took me a weekend to clean up six months of bad data.