November 9, 2020 by Adrian Durow . Analytics
You may have noticed that there are no views in Google Analytics 4, like there are in Universal Analytics. Which means that there isn’t a nice, obvious view setting for filters, where you can exclude your internal traffic or any IP addresses which would represent unnatural traffic to your site.
GA4 actually excludes internal traffic by default when you setup a new property, but you still need to define what ‘internal’ traffic is.
Here’s how…
> Admin
> Data Streams (click on your data stream)
> Tagging Settings
> Define Internal Traffic
> Create
> Give your rule an obvious name. I’d recommend leaving the traffic_type parameter value as ‘internal’ as these will be automatically grouped and excluded at stage #2 below. You can use your own values here, such as department names, or ‘suppliers’. But these will need to be added at stage #2 below, if you want them excluded from the reports. Click create again to save.
> Admin
> Data Settings
> Data Filters
> Click on the ‘Internal Traffic’ filter that is already there, and you’ll notice that any traffic defined as ‘internal’ using the traffic_type parameter (just like you’ve done in #1) is already excluded:
There are 3 ways in which this filter can be applied – I’d advise leaving this as the default ‘Testing’ filter state. Which means that internal traffic will be excluded, but it can be identified in GA4 reports if you need to (under the ‘Test data filter name‘ dimension):
