When folks are blogging for business, many of them are excited and watch over their analytics application.  They post their first few blog posts and then send out the company wide-newsletter to announce the new blog to their 200 employees!  The horns blare and everyone in the company clicks through to see it.

The blogger comes returns the next day, checks their analytics, and they see this incredible spike in traffic!  Woohoo! Corporate blogging really does work, we have 200 visitors already!  Amazing stuff!

Not so amazing.  Those visitors weren't from Search Engines, they were your staff checking out the new company blog!  Booooo!

In the first phase of your implementation and in setting up your Analytics application, be sure to exclude traffic from your own company.  With Google Analytics, this is quite simple:
  1. Edit your analytics settings and you'll find a Filter section:
  2. Add a filter for your company's IP address or addresses.  The syntax is a little funky because Google allows for regular expressions (which are cool).  If you have a single IP address, simply enter it with a slash before each dot:
    Google Analytics - Add IP Address FIlter
Voila!  Now you won't be disappointed when your number of hits drops off after your first blog posts, and you can make sure that you're monitoring the traffic that matters - from outside your own company!