Does anyone use Google Analytics? How Google does it to avoid counting the owner of the website as visitor?

Question

I don't want to be counted as visitor every time I test my page in the hosting. Does Google know i'm the owner of the site by checking if i'm logged in my Gmail account?

Answer 1

I don't think Google does anything like this automatically. But they do provide instructions for excluding based on IP address (or range) and apparently also now by cookie. If you use a CMS or admin interface, you could put the code they provide in an HTML file that you then include into the admin interface pages by IFRAME (to ensure that the cookie stays set for anyone who uses that interface).

Answer 2

Google Analytics relay on you embedding a call to their JavaScript see this link - do not confuse it with how Google does page ranking.

So the answer to your question is that your pages should be smart enough to recognize when the request comes from you and skip the call to the JavaScript.

Answer 3

There are also often application specific ways of blocking google from counting administrators. For example I've used a wordpress analytics plugin that would automatically not include the tracking code if the user was logged in as an administrator. If you are application has the concept as admin then you could write something similar that controls when the code is added.

Answer 4

If you visit your site frequently from connections with a dynamic IP address, eg. home broadband, then excluding IP addresses is not particularly practical. To go beyond IP exclusion, you can create an isolated page on your site that only you know about that includes a call to Analytics to label your cookie.

The Google Analytics _setVar() function lets you label yourself with an arbitrary string, eg. 'internal'. You only need to do this once per browser as long you don't clear your cookies.

Having labelled yourself as 'internal', you can create an Advanced Segment within Google Analytics to exclude visitors with that label.