Comments on: How to disable Google Analytics tracking during development

By: Project 2061 Techlog » Careful with Google Analytics filters

Project 2061 Techlog » Careful with Google Analytics filters — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 17:28:57 +0000

[...] How to disable Google Analytics tracking during development [...]

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 18:40:27 +0000

@Jason. No – you can’t filter old data.

By: Tomasz Banas

Tomasz Banas — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:03:21 +0000

Great info Ben – Thank you

By: Slavi

Slavi — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:55:45 +0000

Thanks for sharing the info.
It’s quite useful.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 05:54:00 +0000

Thanks for the post as it answered my question on how to exclude page urls that are from my local dev environment.

Does it filter existing data? If so, does it take a while before your filter is effective?

By: Ben Huson

Ben Huson — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:48:16 +0000

I guess you may want to enable analytics for a dev site to test you have it set up correctly – particularly if you want to test some of the more advanced functionality of Google Analytics such as the JavaScript tracking functions or e-commerce functionality.

It appears that the tracking code only seems to work if you are using it over an http:// (or https://) connection. If you have a proper development site set up on a local server or at an IP address, this should be fine. However it won’t track anything you open locally on your computer or network over a file:// connection.

If you want to track a development environment separately from your live site you do not need to create a new Analytics account. Instead just create a new profile and use filters (as mentioned in the above post) to filter hits based on the hostname within your live and dev profiles.

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:00:15 +0000

I am little confused here. Why would you guys want to put google analytics on a test env?

By: Testing Google Analytics code in Dev environment before Live « Asach…ugach kahitari

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 09:40:34 +0000

[...] tried to Google this, but so far haven’t found anything significant exceptthis, and even that doesn’t have exactly what I am talking [...]

By: Sumedh

Sumedh — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:56:04 +0000

Hi Ben,

Thanks for the post…

I want to test my analytics code on Dev environment before taking it live.

Our Dev server is not on http://www... so Google wont be able to access it using the URI… This should be the common setting that people do…

What is the solution in such a case?

Thanks in advance :)

By: scott

scott — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:54:14 +0000

Thank you for the tips!!!

By: Richard Sheppard

Richard Sheppard — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 11:42:06 +0000

Well done, Ben! You’ve answered all my questions re: what to do about development sites and GA.