Exclusion of internal traffic

[rebew]

Should we exclude internal traffic from our reports? What are the pros and cons and what is the best way to implement this?

[igupta]

Hey @rebew ,

About whether or not to exclude - it's really a business decision and depends on factor like does it matter if you have other sub-domains that you would like to call "internal". Generally, it's good idea to input all your internal traffic to a test report suite. A few other approaches can be-

1. Stop all traffic from hitting your report suites. (not recommended as you may not be able to debug identify issues)

2. Disperse the traffic in test report suite.

3. Create virtual report suite out of master with segments applied to remove internal traffic

4. Create segments and use those segments in reports wherever required such as sales data

A very common (and reliable) way to remove internal traffic is to get the IP ranges from your IT team and set up segments to exclude those IP ranges. You can use also use  Exclude by IP Address for removing data from certain IP addresses.

Best,

Isha

[christel_guidon]

Hi @rebew 

Are you talking about excluding internal employees from your data? If so, I recommend that you do this for your production report suite. That way you know that you are looking at real customers and not internal employees.

You can use the exclude by ip address (admin section) feature like Isha suggests. If your IP ranges are complex, you can also set up a DB Vista rule with Adobe client care (one time paid engagement) where you can upload your ranges and change them as needed. You can send that 'internal' traffic to a secondary report suite for just your internal traffic. That can come in handy when you are doing tests on production and need to see data related to that

Thanks - Christel

[Jennifer_Dungan]

I agree with the others... this is technically a business decision... but generally most companies exclude internal traffic so that there analytics is more clearly their real traffic...

A lot of companies have work computers set up with their own sites as their "homepage", plus all your developers, QA, Ops, etc people that are on the sites all day long (or at least a lot of the day, since testing will be happening on separate dev environments as well as production)... that's a lot of potential traffic going into your analytics.

I also use internal IPs to block traffic.. though now with so many people working from home, I can only hope that people are logged into VPN (as this is the only way that will still work). You can find this under Admin > All Admin > Exclude by IP... oddly, even though this is set by reporting suite (just choose the correct suite from the top right of the page), it's not under the standard Report Suite settings.. probably some legacy implementation....

I believe there is also a "put a special cookie on your computer" method, however, that is a pain to make sure everyone properly installs the cookie... but that is so legacy, and the "war on cookies" makes that a lot less reliable... as people aren't going to keep checking that the cookie is there and doing what it's supposed to be doing.... So I would not recommend this...

While in theory, the idea of creating Virtual Suites is nice, how you identify Internal Traffic with a segment could be hard... You cannot access IPs in Segments or Workspaces...