Identify and Exclude Internal Visitor IDs in Uberflip Analytics

Objective

The easiest way to remove internal traffic from your Uberflip Analytics data is to exclude your office IP addresses. However, this doesn't cover remote employees, and excluding their individual IP addresses is usually ineffective because most home internet connections use dynamic IP addresses, which change periodically.

A better solution for excluding remote internal users is to use their Visitor IDs instead. Uberflip Analytics assigns unique Visitor IDs to all visitors to your Hub, so in this article, we'll show you how to identify the Visitor IDs of your internal users, then set up persistent filters that automatically exclude these Visitor IDs across all dashboards.

Setup: Enable the Save Dashboard Filters Setting

Since you'll be using a dashboard filter to exclude internal Visitor IDs, we strongly recommend that you turn on the Save Dashboard Filters setting. When this setting is enabled, any filter you set on one dashboard will be saved and automatically applied to all other dashboards. This ensures that you only need to set up the filter to exclude internal Visitor IDs once, rather than each time you open a dashboard.

You can find detailed instructions on how to enable the Save Dashboard Filters setting in this article.

Step 1: Identify an Internal-Only Hub Page

Before you can filter based on Visitor IDs, you need to determine which Visitor IDs belong to your internal users. To do that, you can leverage Uberflip Analytics itself: for any page in a Hub, Uberflip Analytics can export a list of Visitor IDs that viewed that page. Therefore, all you need is a Hub page that is not accessible outside your organization, since any Visitor ID that viewed it would by definition belong to an internal user.

As a result, you first need to identify a suitable Hub page, or create one if necessary. This page:

• Can be any type of page within a Hub: a Hub homepage, a Stream page, or an Item page.
• Must be accessible only to internal users. This could be:
  • A Hub with Hub Authentication or a Stream with Stream Authentication 
  • A Hub or Stream with the No Robots Meta Tag setting enabled, and which has not been shared outside your organization
  • A hidden Stream or hidden Item (with No Robots Meta Tag turned on and not shared externally)
• Must be part of a Hub for which you collect Uberflip Analytics data. This means the page can't be in a Hub where the Prevent Analytics Collection option is enabled.

Your main objective is to capture as many internal Visitor IDs as possible, so the page you choose should have been viewed by most (or ideally all) of your internal users. The ideal situation is if you have an internal-only Hub, as this will allow you to collect the Visitor IDs of everyone who viewed any page in that Hub. Regardless of the type of page you choose, we recommend specifically instructing all of your internal users to visit the page to ensure their Visitor IDs are captured.

When you have identified (or created) the necessary Hub page, proceed to the next step.

Step 2: Export a List of Internal Visitor IDs

Using the internal-only Hub page you you identified or set up earlier, you can now get a list of internal Visitor IDs from Uberflip Analytics.

1. Log in to Uberflip and go to Uberflip Analytics.
2. In the sidebar menu on the left, click on Visitors > Session Overview to open the Session Overview dashboard.
3. Click on Filters at the top of the dashboard to expand the filters menu.
4. Set a filter to display just the internal-only Hub page you selected:
   • For a Hub: Use Hub | is equal to | [insert name of Hub]. This filter will include visitors to all pages in the selected Hub, and is the best option if you have an internal-only Hub.
   • For a Stream: Use Stream Title | is equal to | [insert name of Stream]. This filter will include visitors to the Stream page itself, and any Items in the Stream (even if they did not visit the Stream page).
   • For an Item: Use Item Title | is equal to | [insert name of Item]. This filter will include only visitors to the specified Item page.
5. If needed, change the View Date filter to a longer time range to ensure as many Visitor IDs as possible can be captured.
6. Click on Run to apply the filter.
7. In the dashboard, scroll down to the Session Details table at the bottom, which displays sessions broken down by Visitor ID (second column from left).
8. Hover your mouse over the table, then click on the three-dot ("meatball") menu button that appears in the top right of the table (in the "Session Details" title bar).
9. In the menu that appears, click on Download Data.
10. The Download window will appear. In this window, change the Limit setting to Custom..., which will automatically default to a setting of 5000 rows:
    
    • We recommend leaving all other options on their default settings.
11. Click on Download. This will export a CSV file that contains all of the Visitor IDs that have viewed the selected Hub page. After a few moments, the download should begin automatically.

When the download has finished, proceed to the next step.

Step 3: Set Up a Filter to Exclude Internal Visitor IDs

With the list of internal Visitor IDs, you can now set up a filter to exclude data associated with those Visitor IDs from your dashboards.

Dashboard filters only apply for the user who set them, so any other Uberflip Analytics users in your organization will need set up their own filters by following these instructions. However, all users can use the same list of Visitor IDs, so the person who exports the list can simply share it with others so that they don't need to export it themselves.

1. Open the CSV file containing the internal Visitor IDs.
   • You can open this file in any spreadsheet software, e.g. Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc, or even Google Sheets.
2. In the CSV file, highlight and copy the entire column of Visitor IDs (except the header row that says "Visitor ID"):
   
3. Open Uberflip Analytics and go to any dashboard.
   
   • If Save Dashboard filters is turned on, your filter will apply to all dashboards, so it doesn't matter which one you choose. If the setting is off, you'll need to complete these steps every time you open any dashboard.
4. Click on Filters at the top of the dashboard to expand the filters menu.
5. Scroll down to the Visitor ID filter.
6. Set the filter condition to is not equal to and paste in the Visitor IDs that you copied from the CSV file:
   
7. Click on Run to apply the filter. Any data associated with the listed Visitor IDs will be excluded from all metrics shown on your dashboards.

Additional Notes

Uberflip Analytics will assign a new Visitor ID to any visitor who is not yet known (does not yet have an Uberflip Analytics cookie). This means that internal visitors will be assigned new Visitor IDs if they clear their browser cache/cookies, use incognito mode, or use a different browser. As a result, you may need to collect a fresh list of internal Visitor IDs and update your filter from time to time.