In the old pre CV world, excluding internal users, employees, partners and agencies from Google Analytics data was important. And it was relatively straight forward, when all involved used static IP addresses. However, often times people used multiple devices, connecting to a variety of wifi networks and cellular data hubs. Sometimes their ‘fixed’ IP address would change, but the change only picked up or communicated months later.
Fast forward to the current Coronavirus Pandemic environment, and you have more home workers than ever before. Each typically using their own home broadband to connect to the internet. So each with a new iP address, usually a dynamic one at that…
The result?
All of that excluded internal traffic is included in your reports. Some as direct traffic, but some as organic and even paid traffic. So, at a time when absolute clarity over the true impact of CV on your business is paramount, you have an undefined level of traffic that is in fact your own staff and partners. This does not help with accurate reporting during these challenging times!
However fear not! We have the solution
- You need to have Google Tag Manager installed, and have Google Analytics on your site, installed via a tag in GTM
- Create a custom HTML tag that creates a first party cookie variable, that is for employees only
- Have this cookie only be created when a certain parameter is added to a URL with a page URL trigger
- Create a custom dimension in GA that contains a flag saying if the cookie exists or not
- Add a filter to your main reporting GA profile, that excludes all traffic where this custom dimension is set to true
Simple as that!
Once the above steps are followed, correctly, you simply need to ask all of your employees to visit the company website once, using the main URL with a parameter as defined in step 3. The cookie should be set to last for 365 days, so you need to ask all users to visit it again at least once, per device they use, within less than a year.
For a fully detailed over the shoulder tutorial of how to set this up, please click the link below: