IP Filters can be used to focus your analysis around the traffic patterns of specific user groups.

What is IP filtering?

When a user accesses your website, s/he does so from a device that is identified by a unique number. This number is called an Internet Protocol Address (IP address). The IP address format is 4 groups of 1 to 3 numbers, separated by a full stop (.) e.g. 192.255.45.1 .

Larger organizations often use a specific range of IP addresses, which allows you to identify all traffic that comes from devices within that organization’s office environment.

For example, an organization may use devices that connect to the internet using IP addresses that range from 192.255.45.0 to 192.255.45.255. By recognizing all these IP addresses and grouping them, you are able to either exclude them from your traffic statistics, or to display this data exclusively.

IP filtering has two distinct aims:

1. To remove unwanted traffic from the statistics. This could be traffic from within your own organization; and from partners and service providers that access your website in an administrative capacity. By filtering out visits that come from these IP addresses, you can focus solely on analysing traffic from “normal” users of your site.
2. To identify and monitor traffic from specific focus groups. You may wish to track the activity of some of your competitors when they visit your site, or you may provide services to an organization and wish to monitor the take-up and and usage of these services by that organization.

To set up an IP filter, you are first required to define one or more IP Groups; i.e. ranges of IP numbers that can be named and labelled according to their meaning. This can be done by SiteAnalyze administrators in the Setup section.