What is an Exclusion Filter?
SUMMARY
- It's crucial to separate your site visits from customers and outside visitors.
- The exclusion filter fulfills this vital role.
- Cut out "garbage" data to focus on legitimate visitor traffic.
It's easy to get excited when a short link attracts significant traffic volume. However, if a large portion of that is you and your team testing, checking, and navigating the URL, it can create a misleading impression of inflated site action. This is a pitfall that can be avoided with the use of an exclusion filter.
Have you ever heard the expression, "Garbage in, garbage out?" Well, self-generated traffic fits that description if you count it as a legitimate business interest (only customers and prospects can provide). That's where the Exclusion Filter steps in.
It's an IP address filter designed to prevent your own traffic from skewing the click metrics. In other words, it allows you to filter out clicks from your home or work IP addresses. To reiterate:
- You want your navigation or test clicks to be distinct from outside visitor traffic, creating false impressions of business interest.
- The exclusion filter ejects all short link traffic from your organization's network as if it doesn't exist.
- If you enter the Exclusion Filter correctly, it ignores any visits you don't want to include from any given IP address.
