One of the major precautions while setting up any marketing campaigns or experiments in any digital activity is to filter the data that comes from internal traffic or an incorrect traffic source.
Why?
Throughout the journey of the users, whether it is via GA4, Hotjar, Clarity, or any other analytics tool, we gather a lot of data points and use those to come up with insights that help us optimize the outcomes of the activities.
Suppose there is a lot of internal traffic and its’ user behavior is being recorded in the system. In that case, it can affect your overall analysis and might give us false insights that can affect your overall performance negatively.
We can not possibly filter all the internal traffic but we can use various tactics to avoid it.
One of the easiest ways to do it is filtering traffic from an IP address – if your work environment uses a static IP to access the internet, you can go for this option.
Many times the traffic from staging environments gets recorded into the system. This can be avoided by using different domains for different environments and adding domain-level filtering in your analytics software.
For CMS like WordPress, it becomes difficult to do domain-level filtering. But, you can use your Tag Manager to capture and send variables in the data layer and then add triggers to decide whether to filter the traffic or not. E.g. In a typical WordPress website, if the admin has logged in, the .admin-bar class gets added to thetag of the website. Tag Managers can detect that. Simply filter the traffic if the .admin-bar class is found.
While filtering incorrect traffic is important, it is equally important to implement it accurately. Once the traffic/data is filtered from entering into your analytics software, there is no other way to get it back. Hence after you apply the filter, testing it with adequate measures is essential. If a particular filter can also remove legitimate traffic, it is best you come up with some other methods to figure out the solution.
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