Can the _ga cookie value be used to exclude self traffic in Google analytics universal?

Question

Google analytics store a unique user id in a cookie names _ga . Some self traffic was already counted, and I was wondering if there's a way to filter it out by providing the _ga cookie value to some exclusion filter.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Firstly, I'm gonna put it out there that there is no solution for excluding or removing historical data , except to make a filter or segment for your reports, which doesn't remove or prevent that data from showing up; it simply hides it. So if you're looking for something that gets rid of the data that is already there, sorry, not happening. Now on to making sure more data doesn't show up.

GA does not offer a way to exclude traffic by its visitor cookie (or any cookie in general). In order to do this, you will need to read the cookie yourself and expose it to something that GA can exclude by. For example, you can pop a custom variable or override/append the page name.

But this isn't really that convenient for lots of reasons, such as having to burn a custom variable slot, or having to write some server-side or client-side code to read the cookie and act on a value, etc..

And even if you do decide to do this, you're going to have to consider at least 2 scenarios in which this won't work or break:

1) This won't work if you go to your site from a different browser, since browsers can't read each other's cookies.

2) It will break as soon as you clear your cookies.

An alternative you should consider is to make an exclusion filter on your IP address . This has the benefit of:

1. works regardless of which browser you are on
2. you don't have to write any code for it that burns or overwrites any variables
3. you don't have to care about the cookie

General Notes

I don't presume to know your situation or knowledge, so take this for what it's worth: simply throwing out general advice because nothing goes without saying.

If you were on your own site to QA something and are wanting to remove data from some kind of development or QA efforts, a better solution in general is to have a separate environment for developing and QAing stuff. For example a separate dev.yoursite.com subdomain that mirrors live. Then you can easily make an exclusion on that subdomain (or have a separate view or property or any number of ways to keep that dev/qa traffic out).

Another thing is.. how much traffic are we talking here anyway? You really shouldn't be worrying about a few hits and whatnot that you've personally made on your live site. Again, I don't know your full situation and what your normal numbers look like, but in the grand scheme of things, a few extra hits is a drop of water in a bucket, and in general it's more useful to look at trends in the data over time, not exact numbers at a given point in time.