Josh Schumacher: A PHP Developer » Analytics http://blog.joshschumacher.com The biggest and the best in the Northwest Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:54:30 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Howto: Exclude developer hits in Analytics http://blog.joshschumacher.com/2007/03/16/howto-not-track-developer-hits-in-analytics/ http://blog.joshschumacher.com/2007/03/16/howto-not-track-developer-hits-in-analytics/#comments Fri, 16 Mar 2007 18:25:29 +0000 Josh Schumacher http://blog.joshschumacher.com/2007/03/16/howto-not-track-developer-hits-in-analytics/ When developing a site, I visit it a lot - OK Josh, that was an obvious. Point is, I was tired of tracking my visits to sites that I maintain. I really care about tracking significant users and how they navigate the site and what pages they find valuable but I don't care about my hits.

I put together a quick page that I can navigate to that will install a cookie for the browser. I can then check for the cookie in my standard header include so the Google Analytics tracking code isn't sent to the browser.

The code to set the cookie (and make sure it's installed correctly)

PLAIN TEXT
PHP:
  1. setcookie("hideAnalytics", 'true', time()+(3600*24*365*30));
  2.  
  3. if(isset($_COOKIE['hideAnalytics']) && $_COOKIE['hideAnalytics'] == 'true')
  4. {
  5.     print "Cookie installed";
  6. }

Similar (but inverse) code is then inserted in my header

PLAIN TEXT
PHP:
  1. <? if(!isset($_COOKIE['hideAnalytics']) || $_COOKIE['hideAnalytics'] != 'true') { ?>
  2. ANALYTICS TRACKING CODE
  3. <? } ?>

Analytics is a great tool and it's going to be even more useful now that I won't be tracking my own hits.

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