Excluding Your Own Traffic from GA4

Excluding your own traffic from traffic reports in Google Analytics 4 ( GA4 ) is helpful to ensure that your data accurately represents genuine user interactions.

Unfortunately, GA4 doesn't make this easy.

Sygnal generally doesn't do this because after launch our traffic is miniscule compared to public site traffic. But, ideally, it would be easy to exclude our traffic and the traffic of our clients from their website reports, so we've done some investigation.

Here are our notes and some approaches you can explore.

GA4 Filtering

IP Address Filtering

In GA4, IP address filtering is not as straightforward as it was in Universal Analytics. However, you can still filter out traffic from specific IP addresses using Data Streams and BigQuery.

If you export your GA4 data to BigQuery, you can create a view or run queries that exclude specific IP addresses.

Use Google Analytics Filters

While GA4 doesn't offer predefined IP exclusion filters, you can use the "Audience" feature to create an audience that includes your internal traffic and then exclude this audience in your report customizations.

Browser Extension

Install a browser extension like "Google Analytics Blocker" or similar, which will prevent GA from tracking your own visits on all sites that use Google Analytics. This method is user-specific and requires each team member to install the extension.

GTM Filtering

If you use GTM in your site to collect your analytics data, you have some added options here in how you can exclude that traffic.

Google Tag Manager Blocking

Use Google Tag Manager ( GTM ) to control when the GA4 tag fires. You can set up a trigger that prevents the GA4 tag from firing for users from specific IP addresses or under certain conditions ( e.g., when accessing from your company's network ).

We've found this approach difficult to implement with standard GTM, however there appears to be a "server-side" proxied GTM implementation that has better access to the IP.

Possible paths;

• Collect the IP using a geoip service, and put it in the GTM datalayer for GTM to identify and exclude.
• Use HTTP headers, which are set via a browser plugin.
• Identify clients by IP at a reverse-proxy layer, and add a GTM datalayer chunk to the pages for identification and exclusion.

Cookie-Based Filtering

Implement a system where a specific cookie is set on the devices/browsers of internal users. You can then modify your GTM ( or GA4 ) configuration to ignore sessions where this cookie is present.

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Each of these methods has its pros and cons and requires different levels of access and technical expertise.