Analytics settings

Analytics settings control which visits BrightSite counts. The main setting is a list of IP addresses to exclude.

Why exclude your own visits

Everyone who works on the site visits it. Editors check pages after publishing, designers reload while making changes, and business owners look at their own home page more often than they realize.

On a large site this is noise. On a small site it distorts everything. If your site gets 200 visits a month and your team accounts for 60 of them, almost a third of your traffic is you. Worse, your team's browsing is not typical: it lands on pages real visitors never see, and it makes your average time and bounce rate meaningless.

Excluding your own addresses fixes this. From then on, visits from those addresses are not recorded.

Adding an exclusion

Open the analytics settings screen and add the IP address you want to exclude. There is a shortcut for the common case: an option to exclude the address you are browsing from right now, so you do not have to look it up.

Add an address for each place your team works from regularly, such as the office and any home addresses for people who work on the site often.

Home addresses change

Most home and small-office internet connections use a dynamic IP address, which the provider can change without warning. If your numbers creep back up, the likely reason is that your address changed and the old exclusion no longer matches. Re-add it using the shortcut.

Mobile data is a harder case. Phone networks assign addresses that change constantly, so excluding a phone is generally not practical. If you check the site heavily from a phone, expect a little of your own traffic to be counted.

This does not affect Google Analytics

This is the point people most often get wrong, so it is worth stating plainly.

IP exclusions here apply only to BrightSite's own analytics. They have no effect on Google Analytics or any other third-party tracking you have added to your site.

If you also run Google Analytics, your visits will keep appearing there until you exclude yourself inside Google Analytics as well, using its own filtering settings. Do it in both places, or your two sets of numbers will not agree and you will not know which to trust.

What is not affected

Excluding an address only stops future visits from being recorded. It does not remove visits already counted, so historical numbers stay as they were. Give it a month before comparing, so you are comparing two clean periods rather than one clean and one inflated.