Have you ever read The House at Pooh Corner, the second in the classic Winnie-the-Pooh books by A. A. Milne? In one story, Pooh and Piglet are out walking when they come across some tracks in the snow. They begin following the tracks, which to their alarm are soon joined by new tracks, and so on, until they suppose they are following a large group of dangerous woozles. Eventually it is revealed that they are walking in circles around a tree, and the tracks are their own.

It's a charming story, and we all feel warm inside for remembering it, but why am I talking Pooh? You may fall victim to a similar fate with Google Analytics if you don't take care.

If you'll recall, Google Analytics is the indispensable tool for tracking visitors to your website. It will track ALL visitors. Yes, even you yourself. If an unwary webmaster gets set up with this tool and keeps working on the site, adding content and practicing good SEO hygiene, he will soon be rewarded with some exciting-looking numbers and graph movements. Energized, he may redouble his efforts with the site. Wow, look at that! His hard work is instantly rewarded with an attractive up-tick in traffic!

Unless, of course, our webmaster of very little brain has neglected to exclude his own visits to the web site, those of his boss, client, or any other known personage who is most definitely not a new lead. Instead, he has been following his own tracks.

Fortunately, Google has a handy way to keep your traffic data clean. You can add one or more filters to your account settings that will exclude certain IP addresses. This will no doubt deflate your traffic numbers, but it will also reduce the heartache of false results.

Here's a quick and dirty how-to.

1. On your Google Analytics main page, click the "Filter Manager" link. It's below the table with your website profiles, on the right hand side. 
2. You'll get a new table with all your filters. Probably you have none. But on the top right of the table, there is a link to "+ Add Filter"; click it.
3. Give your new filter a name. Might I suggest "woozle".
4. You want a Predefined filter to Exclude traffic - and that is what you get by default. You can either exclude traffic from particular domains (if your company network is set up that way) or a particular IP address. Select what you want from the drop down menu, and then fill in the domain or the IP.
5. Be sure to apply the filter to the websites you want; these are located at the bottom left. Select the ones you want the filter to apply to and click the "Add" button to move them over to the right.
6. Save Changes and you're done.

Note that this procedure only applies to individual IP addresses, which is fine if you are a lone gun consultant working from home with a fixed IP address. If you have a range of IP numbers, you can get them all filtered in one fell swoop, but you'll have to use a Custom filter instead, and that requires that you have the correct Filter Pattern. How do you get the correct pattern? Google offers a nice tool to create the filter pattern, and here I have kindly linked it. (Note that I did not put the link on text saying click here - that is very poor hygiene indeed.)

One final note: the exclusion filter is NOT retroactive. That is, if you have results that include your own site visits, adding the filter will not change the existing numbers. You might as well toss those results out the door. But at least you can have more faith in your numbers in the days and weeks to come.