Epikone highly recommends creating a filter to exclude internal traffic from Google Analytics reports. Internal traffic is traffic that is generated by your own internal sources, such as web-developers, customers service reps, or others who are not a good representation of how your true visitors are using your site. If this traffic is tracked by Google Analytics it will inflate visitor data thus causing the reports to be inaccurate.
We exclude internal traffic sources by creating a filter that excludes traffic from a certain IP addresses.
To setup a filter to exclude your IP from Google Analytics reports use the following settings:
The backslashes "\" are supposed to be there! This is because Google Analytics takes advantage of Regular Expressions and the backslashes tell Google Analytics to escape these "dots" in your IP address. What are regular expressions?
The Google Analytics Help Center has a great definition:
"Posix regular expressions are used to match or capture portions of a field using wildcards and metacharacters. They are often used for text manipulation tasks. Most of the filters included in Google Analytics use these expressions to match the data and perform an action when a match is achieved."
For more information on regular expressions and how they are used in Google Analytics check
This Series of Blog Post from Robbin Steif over at
LunaMetrics.