12 Simple Steps To Exclude Internal Traffic From GA4

It used to be so simple in Universal Analytics- you want to stop internal traffic from being reported in your Google Analytics view so you’d simply click on ADMIN > VIEW FILTER > ADD FILTER and use a pre defined filter EXCLUDE > TRAFFIC FROM THE IP ADDRESSES > THAT ARE EQUAL TO > IP ADDRESS:

With GA4, however, it is a little trickier.

Lots of people will automatically click on ADMIN > DATA SETTINGS > DATA FILTERS and see there’s already a filter for internal traffic set-up- unfortunately, it isn’t as easy as this! Google Analytics does provide a default filter called ‘Internal Traffic’:

However, you’ll see that the current state is ‘Testing’ and if you click on the arrow, you’ll see there’s nowhere to identify your internal traffic so Google Analytics can filter it out.

We’ll be back to this data filter page later, before that, we’ll need to set up a rule to identify our internal traffic via IPs.

Define IPs to be marked as internal traffic:

1. Click on the gear icon (bottom left of the screen) and under PROPERTY select DATA STREAMS:

2. Select the arrow on the Data Stream to view the configuration settings:

3. Under GOOGLE TAG, select CONFIGURE TAG SETTINGS:

4. Under SETTINGS, select to SHOW ALL:

5. Then, in the expanded list, select to DEFINE INTERNAL TRAFFIC:

6. Choose to CREATE a new rule:

What we are doing here is creating a rule that defines what the value of the traffic_type parameter value is. In this case, the value of the parameter is ‘internal’ and we rule what that is defined by, by listing our office IP address.

Within the configuration:

7. Create a rule name- something that describes the individual or group of IPs that you will add.
8. Keep the value of the parameter as ‘internal’ as we need this to match the default filter setting (more on that later)
9. Add your list of internal IPs. This could be as simple as one IP that equals an IP address or an IP that starts with, ends with or contains a pattern, or one that matches a range of IPs. 

Be careful! There’s 4.3 billion IP addresses worldwide so if you use anything outside the option for ‘IP address equals’ – make sure you don’t inadvertently create a rule that matches more IPs that you want!

Once that’s done, save your changes and go back to the main GA4 settings page:

Use Data Filters to filter out internal traffic:

Now that we’ve created a rule for our ‘internal’ value for the event parameter ‘traffic_type’ we have to use this to filter this traffic, from these IPs, out of reports.

10.  Go back to the account settings page and under PROPERTY settings, in DATA SETTINGS, select DATA FILTERS:

 

You’ll see that there’s already the pre-defined filter set up by Google Analytics that we mentioned at the start of this article:

Click the arrow to view the configuration of this filter. As long as the parameter value you used in your internal traffic rule matches ‘internal’, it will match the parameter value in the pre-defined filter for internal traffic:

However, you’ll notice that this filter state is in ‘Testing’ mode.

This means that Google Analytics will not use this filter in reports yet, instead, it will send through a dimension in reports called ‘Test data filter name’ – so you can see how much traffic this rule and filter condition meets, before you are confident that you want to ‘Activate’ this filter.

Test Data Filters before activating filter out internal traffic:

*Note that this will only work if you’ve created the rule to define internal traffic (and internal traffic has visited the site within that time range)

11. To expose the dimension in reports, simply add a secondary dimension called ‘TEST DATA FILTER NAME’ and this will show you the split in Internal Traffic vs (not set):

12. If this looks correct i.e. is roughly the amount of internal traffic that you’d expect to visit the site, go back to the Data Filter and select to ACTIVATE the filter:

Voilà! You’ve now:

• Created a rule using IPs to define the parameter value ‘internal’ for the parameter name ‘traffic_type’
• Created a filter based on this rule
• Tested the internal traffic filter before activating it. 

4 responses to “12 Simple Steps To Exclude Internal Traffic From GA4”

1. sam says:

   June 18, 2023 at 10:42 pm

   In step 11, what screen are on? How did you get to that page to add dimension? That part seems to be missing.

   Reply
   • Joanne Kearney says:

     June 19, 2023 at 8:12 am

     Hi Sam,

     Step 11 uses the Traffic Acquisition table (under the Acquisition reports) to add a secondary dimension to the table for ‘Test Data Filter Name’.
     Step 11 will only work if you’ve created the rule to define internal traffic as per the previous steps in the blog (and internal traffic has visited the site within that time range).

     Kind Regards,

     Joanne

     Reply
2. Bojan Basrak says:

   August 2, 2023 at 4:27 pm

   This method of filtering internal traffic by IP addresses might work for a few people in a small team, but for a large organization with hundreds of remote workers, it just isn’t feasible.

   I created a better method where users can self-identify as “internal” right on the website itself, which will send a GA4 custom event parameter and even set a cookie for every following visit.

   Here’s a step-by-step guide.
   https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/filtering-internal-traffic-ga4-self-id-without-ip-addresses-basrak

   Reply
   • Joanne Kearney says:

     August 2, 2023 at 4:13 pm

     Thanks for this Bojan- this is a great detailed article!

     Reply