Google analytic’s is great for webmasters, It helps them to look how people are using their website, what is working well and more importantly how the website is failing people. Without the likes of Google’s goal tracking, funnels and filters it would make Conversion Rate Optimisation much harder than it currently is. Being able to track how people use your website is vital for yourself and for your user’s experience.
For other people Google analytics is evil!! They think its Google playing big brother tracking and monitoring everything you do and they will do anything to stop them! (apart from leaving their computer and getting a life in the daylight!!)
Then there are people like me. I love analytics but i browse my own websites a lot and the websites of clients. If im working on a clients website i may log test pages in their analytics accidentally, i will browse other pages, i may reload their homepage several times a minute, I may look to see what the payment process is on the website. All of which will be tracked and recording traffic that i personally doesn’t think it should. This is one reason i always look to disable any tracking from my computer.
There are several ways you can block analytics. Google have recently released a Google Analytics Opt out plug-in that can be added to your browser and it will block Google from logging your visit. This can be found at http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. Google have released this saying they want to give the user more control over what data Google collects about them, they haven’t however released anything that hasn’t already been done using other methods. This plug-in is available for Firefox 3.5 +, IE 7 & 8 and Chrome 4.x and higher. This is a start and for the purpose i want to block analytic’s it will be enough, however, i don’t really want to have to install something three times.
There are other plug-ins that are available but they are mostly for Firefox, not a great solution of you test websites properly in multiple browsers.
The final method is to make your PC block Google from sending data. This can be done because the address Google uses for its analytics is an address you never need to browse to. By blocking your computer from accessing this address you can stop Google from tracking your movements for analytics.
To do this we need to edit your computers host file. A host file is checked by your browser before it retrieves information form a DNS server. If the address your computer is trying to access then is in the host file then it will always use the information in your host file.
Your host file can be found at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts (this is the windows 7 path) open the host file in notepad and add the following lines
# BLOCK GOOGLE ANALYTICS
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com
This is telling your PC that when ever google-analytics.com is contacted by your PC (or the other two variations) then always make the PC use 127.0.0.1 as the IP address. This means Google analytics will be sending its data to the wrong IP address and data will not be recorded.
This method will work for everything on your PC that tries to contact google-analytics.com. If you are not confident in changing files like this then always take a backup.
Most of them seem to have been blocked as the site does have the standard 1 mile long Google robots.txt file, however there are still some results that have been properly cached.
