Question

I’ve searched around on SO, and found a few questions that ask about this, but most of the answers that I’ve come across all seem to suggest either filtering via IP range or introducing conditional code to the engine powering the site; neither of these options are viable for me. If this does turn out to be a duplicate where this an answer that fits in to my use case, then I apologize in advance, but I just can’t seem to find anything.

My original method of filtering myself out from Google Analytics was to simply redirect requests to google-analytics.com and the https version of GA to localhost in my hosts file. This works just fine on my desktop, but it is useless when testing on mobile devices like an iPhone (unless somebody knows how to finagle the iPhone’s hosts file without jailbreaking).

My setup for local testing is to use pow with .dev domains for the local project directories, and then when I need to see the development version of sites on mobile devices I use Xip.io in conjunction with Adobe Shadow.

I can’t filter by IP range because I frequently work from home, and my ISP doesn’t provide static addresses for residential accounts.

I tried to set up a Custom exclude filter in my Google Analytics profile to filter out traffic originating from these domains, but they either don’t work or I have a really bad misunderstanding of how the Exclude filters work (which is entirely possible). I have Custom Filters set up to Exclude based on the Hostname, matching the patterns \.dev and .*xip\.io/.* but these filters do absolutely nothing. I believe this is because this filter is, technically, looking for the hostname of the originating domain and not the hostname being requested, but I’m really not sure because the language is vague and differs depending on which help document you’re looking at.

Short of manually removing the GA tracking codes from the site during local dev then going back and adding them back in, does anybody have any suggestions or can anybody tell me what I’m doing wrong with my Exclude filters?

Answer 1

I’ve been using a variation on the analytics tracking code to prevent page views from being tracked on our staging server — something like:

if (!/\.dev|xip\.io/.test(window.location.hostname)) _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

Alternatively, you could apply this to the _setAccount call. If you do this and look at the tracking requests, the web property ID shows up as ‘UA-XXXXX-X’