Users of your sites who are internal to the organisation show markedly different behaviours than your “average” user. The organisation may have

• the home page set as default on internal browsers skewing page views, visits and bounce rate
• developers spending time debugging applications giving long on page and site times,
• Call centre staff use FAQ pages repeatedly.

These examples show why you should make some attempt at separating internal traffic. The default method is by IP address, but this is not always simple to identify. A small business may have a dynamic IP address, whilst large organisations have a hard time identifying one fixed address for the whole organisation due to internal communication errors, intransigent IT and other entertaining scenarios I’m sure you’ve experienced.

Hacks to the rescue!

It is possible to set a cookie on internal users computers, by pointing users to an orphaned page (that is one not linked elsewhere) that has some extra analytics code in.

Using Google Analytics as an example,

for ga.js you would use
body onLoad="javascript:pageTracker._setVar('test_value');"
on this page only that sets a cookie with value internal

for newer asynchronous version you would use

_gaq.push(['_setVar','internal']); before _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

And then setup a filter that excludes this value.

(ASIDE: Google need to update their help pages to account for newer asynchronous code – the help page still refers to the method for ga.js)

Another option is to use campaign tracking in the form most appropriate for the web analytics tool you use –

• create a campaign in the tool called internal,
• set up a filter if necessary
• email a link to a page that has the campaign variables appended to all the internal staff you wish to obliterate from your reports

Both of these methods rely on cookies staying the same – however some organisations regular delete cookies through their systems which would mean redoing the above or trying this next method.

Examine server provider under visitors in your web analytics tool – if your organisation is large enough it will show up on here. This is useful if you need an aggregate of all internal users, and the beauty of this method is if you are a Google Analytics user, it can be used as a segment