How do I exclude visitors from my analytics?

Contents

Note

If you’ve already set up exclusions and are experiencing difficulties with them, check out this article for help troubleshooting.

Why should I use exclusions?

Excluding certain domains and addresses is a helpful step to keep your analytics data clean. PathFactory tracks every visit to your Content Tracks, but there are certain visitors that you may not want to view data for.

For Example:
You may want to exclude the email addresses of the individuals in your company who will be working with and testing your content tracks.

You might also want to exclude visitors from the email domain pathfactory.com, since these visitors will most likely be Client Support Representatives who are helping you with your content tracks.

How do I exclude visitors from my Analytics?

If you set any visitor exclusions, you will see these exclusions affect your engagement data from that point forward. Visitor Exclusions are not applied retroactively to engagement data collected before the exclusion was set.

Note	Engagement data from excluded visitors/IP addresses will still be collected by PathFactory, but will be automatically excluded from view in your analytics. If you want to view data from excluded visitors you are able to do so with the Show Excluded Visitors filter on Analytics pages.

Click your username in the top right corner, and select Organization Settings from the drop-down menu.
Organization Settings menu item
Select the Analytics page.
Analytics page
- Start with IP exclusions. This type of exclusion works by removing visitors that come from the specified IP address(es).
  
  Enter the IP address(es) of your office(s) and those of any remote employees. We strongly recommend using IP exclusions.
  
  For information on excluding ranges of IP addresses, see the section below.
  
  Please note that IP exclusions do not work if the visitor is on a public network (eg. hotel) or working remotely (if their remote IP is not included).
- Next, enter the email domains and addresses of visitors you would like excluded.
  
  We recommend that you exclude yourcompanydomain.com and pathfactory.com.
  
  Do not include the @ symbol before the email domain.
  
  You might also include any personal email addresses you use when testing your Content Tracks.
- We don’t typically recommend excluding by ISP domain unless traffic from a specific ISP is undesirable to you. If you’d like to exclude by ISP email support@pathfactory.com and we can ensure this is the right option for you.Enter your exclusions.
  
  Note
  You are able to enter as many values as you want in each box.
  Press Enter after every entry.
Click Save.

How do I exclude IP ranges?

There are 3 ways you can exclude ranges of IP addresses:

IP Range Exclusion using wild card (*) notation:
Users must enter IP ranges in the format of xxx.xxx.xx.* to exclude all traffic from xxx.xxx.xx.0 to xxx.xxx.xx.255 IPs.

For example:
Entering 192.168.0.* will exclude visitor traffic from 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.0.255
IP Range Exclusion using Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notation:
Users must enter IP ranges in the format of xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/n where n must be an integer between 25-32.

For example:
Entering a value of 192.168.0.0/27 will exclude any visitor traffic between 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.0.32 from your analytics.
IP Range Exclusion with a sub-range:
Users must use the format of xxx.xxx.xx.[0-255] to exclude IP’s from a 0-255 IP range.

For example:
Entering 192.168.0.[24-26] will exclude visitor traffic between 192.168.0.24 to 192.168.0.26

Things to note:

Exclusions will not be applied retroactively:
Visitors from IPs or IP ranges will begin to be excluded from reporting analytics from the date onward that IP(s) were added to the exclusion list and will not exclude traffic retroactively from historical analytics.
IP ranges entered previously will be applied:
Some customers have previously added IP ranges in the Excluded IP Addresses text area. This was not previously supported, but if the existing IP ranges are written using one of the support IP range formats, visitors from these IP ranges will be excluded going forward after Release 57.

Want more information?

If you only use email address and/or email domain exclusions (and not IP exclusions) you need to take some extra steps when viewing your content tracks to ensure your visit is being properly excluded. This is why we strongly encourage using IP exclusions as well.

How email address/domain exclusions work:

You open one of your content tracks, which starts your session (this does not apply to using preview mode).
PathFactory collects engagement data during your session.
If PathFactory is able to de-anonymize you during this session, and your de-anonymized identity matches one of the excluded email addresses or email domains, then that session will be excluded from your analytics.

How can you ensure you are de-anonymized during your session:

Option 1

Click an emailing tracking link sent from your Marketing Automation Platform. Continue to use the same browser and device. Don’t clear your cookies.

Opening the content track from within an email automatically associates your email address with the session. At this point PathFactory drops a cookie on your browser, so that future visits to any of your content tracks from that same device and browser will also be de-anonymized.
If you use a different browser or device, or clear your cookies, you will have to open the content track using the email tracking link from within an email again.

Option 2

Open your content track in a browser using the email tracking link and manually copy in your email address.

Opening the content track and adding your email address into the URL associates your email address with the session. At this point PathFactory drops a cookie on your browser, so that future visits to any of your content tracks from that same device and browser will also be de-anonymized.
If you use a different browser or device, or clear your cookies, you will have to repeat the steps of opening the content track with an email tracking link with your email address manually added into the URL.

Option 3

Fill out a form when previewing the content track. This form must have the capture tag on it (if it doesn’t, you will have to use one of the 2 options above, or start using IP exclusions as well).

The capture tag pulls your email address from the submitted form fill, and associates it with your session. At this point PathFactory drops a cookie on your browser, so that future visits to any of your content tracks from that same device and browser will also be de-anonymized.
If you use a different browser or device, or clear your cookies, you will have to fill out a form (which has a capture tag) again while viewing the content track.

Updated on April 13, 2023

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