03 Oct Structuring your Social Media Traffic for Success

In social media marketing just as in any type of marketing, being able to determine the campaigns that are moving the needle in your business is vital. In fact, you should be able to track all your traffic and know its exact source. This will allow you to analyse patterns in your users’ behaviour to consistently review your strategy and invest more time and budget on the platforms that are driving results. In this article, we will talk about some tactics that will help you optimise the traffic to your website and get clean data from Google Analytics that will tell you what your audience is after.

Excluding your IP Address from GA

The first thing you should do to help to improve the quality of the data that you’re getting from Google Analytics (GA) is to block your IP address. IP stands for “Internet Protocol” and an IP Address is a “unique string of numbers separated by full stops that identifies each computer using the Internet Protocol to communicate over a network”. If you don’t exclude your IP address on GA your visits to your website will, therefore, be taken into account and included in your reports, which will make the data inaccurate. So consider blocking the IP address of your office and if you work from home make sure to exclude that one too. Also, ask your employees to send you their home IP addresses, if they work from home as well, so that you can add them in the exclusion list.

To get your IP address simply go to https://www.whatsmyip.org/ and you will automatically see a message saying “your IP address is” followed by a 10 digit code. Now, how do you exclude your IP address from GA? Below are the different steps you should take to do that.