Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Totally Remove "localhost" entries from Google Analytics
-
Hello All,
In Google Analytics I see a bunch of traffic coming from "localhost:4444 / referral".
I had tried once before to create a filter to exclude this traffic source, but obviously I did it wrong since it's still showing up.
Here is the filter I have currently:
Filter Name: Exclude localhost
Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: Referral
Filter Pattern: .localhost:4444.
Case Sensitive: NoCan anyone see what I'm doing wrong and give me a push in the right direction?
Thanks in advance!
-
The filter I used a long time ago that worked at the time was a hostname one using (.?localhost.?)
Filter Name: Exclude localhost
Filter Type: Custom filter > Hostname
Filter Pattern: (.?localhost.?)
Case Sensitive: NoNow I block via code so I'm not sure if this still works - feel free to try. Also, I'm not sure why the filter uses both * and ? since the star should be inclusive of ? wildcard but I can no longer find the source.
Good luck
-
Hi Robert,
did you resolve this problem as I have exactly the same thing showing on my analytics too and it is driving me mad?
-
Does anyone have any ideas?
I'm still totally stumped!
-
Does anyone have any ideas?
Having this silly "localhost:4444" entry is skewing all of my numbers and no matter what I try, it won't seem to filter it out.
Any help is very much appreciated!
Thanks!
-
Thanks Mike.
At least I know I'm not alone in being totally & completely baffled!
Hopefully someone else can give me a push in the right direction.
Cheers!
-
I'm sort of baffled, myself. I see no reason why this would be unfilterable. I'm marking this as an unanswered question, hopefully someone comes to our rescue here.
-
Putting the filter pattern of "localhost" did not work... sadly.
I still see "localhost:4444 / referral" in my reports.
There must be a way to filter this out.... I'm sure I'm not the only one with this problem (or at least I hope not!)
Any other ideas?
Thanks in advance.
-
There was no real reason I wasn't just trying localhost.
I just thought we needed some other parameters on there... but clearly those weren't working.
I just updated the filter now and I'll check tomorrow's data to see if the answer was really this simple.
Thanks!
-
Was there any reason you're not trying just
localhost
as the filter pattern? No asterisks, quotes, backslashes or anything?
-
Unfortunately that did not work.
I still see this in my referral reports:
localhost:4444 / referral
Just to confirm, the filter I set is:
Filter Name: Exclude localhost
Filter Type: Custom Filter > Exclude
Filter Field: Referral
Filter Pattern: localhost*
Case Sensitive: NoAny other ideas? I'll try anything.
-
Do you have a update on this? Did it work?
-
If I put localhost then I get a "Regular expression is invalid" error.
I'll put: localhost*
I'll watch it for a couple days and see what happens.
Thanks!
-
1: the "." in front of "*localhost" might break the filter i guess. The same goes for the "." after "4444".
2: Have you tried localhost* or localhost ?
-
Thanks for the link... this is kind of what I had followed earlier, but it still doesn't work.
In my original question you can see the current filter I have setup.
Yet, for some reason this is not blocking what I need since I still see "localhost:4444 / referral" in my reports.
Any other ideas?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google analytics suddenly stopped tracking all my landing pages
Hey guys. I love the new update of GA. Looks so clean. So, of course, I was excited to see how my landing pages were doing. I went to behavior, all content, all pages. And I noticed it's only showing me 19 pages out of the 93 I have indexed. And none of the top ones at all! Can't find them anywhere in GA! Anyone seen this before? Thank you so much
Reporting & Analytics | | Meier0 -
Google Analytics - Organic Search Traffic & Queries -What caused the huge difference?
Our website traffic dropped a little bit during the last month, but it's getting better now, almost the same with previous period. But our conversion rate dropped by 50% for the last three weeks. What could cause this huge drop in conversion rate? In Google Analytics, I compared the Organic Search Traffic with previous period, the result is similar. But the Search Engine Optimization ->Queries shows that the clicks for last month is almost zero. What could be the cause of this huge differnce? e9sJNwD.png k4M8Fa5.png
Reporting & Analytics | | joony0 -
Google Analytics Real Time Not Working! :(
Hello Everyone, Today, the real time feature in my google analytics stopped working. I am able to see that traffic is visiting my site, but not in real time. The real time count is usually at 0. But, there are some instances where real time will come back online, but there will be only 1 unique visitor. At any given time, our website usually has 20 visitors or so..Has anyone encountered this issue? Where should i start looking for fixes? What are the possible problems? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | KarlMarxTheBear0 -
Google Analytics shows most referrers as "Direct" -- What are some better tools?
Very often Google Analytics will show 50-90% of our referrers as (direct) which is not very helpful. Are there other tools out there that will provide a clearer breakdown of what other websites are sending us our traffic? Specifically, I want to be able to be able to tell who are the top traffic referrers to my top performing pages on my site for the last 30 days. (I want to be able to study this on a per-page basis.) Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Brand_Psychic0 -
Set Up of Goal Tracking with Google Analytics-$750 a Fair Price????
Greetings Moz Community! My firm operates commercial real estate website that contains 3-4 forms. Each form represents a goals. Google Analytics has been set up for years, but it does not track these form completions/goals properly. My SEO firm has offered to configure Goals on Google Analytics for $750. Is this a fair price? If the set up takes one hour, I am really over paying. But if this is a complex project that may take 7-9 hours the pricing seems OK. Also, the SEO firm will require an additional $750 in the future to set up event tracking. Is this excessive? I might add that my developer will need to add code to my web site. My SEO company has proven reliable and accurate. I can go to sleep at night knowing they are doing a good job. Where as my Argentinian developers really try their best, but perhaps because of the language barrier, they can make mistakes from time to time. I am willing to pay a premium to ensure that the job is done correctly domestically, however I don't appreciate over paying. Is the $750 payment for setting up Google Analytics reasonable assuming the job is done well??? Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Why are plus signs (+) suddenly showing up in Google Analytics organic search keywords reports?
Since June 13, 2013, the number of organic search queries containing a plus sign (+) has gone up over 1,000% compared to the previous period on my site in Google Analytics. These plus signs appear to be taking the place of spaces in these search queries (i.e. "word1+word2+word3"). This appears to be almost (or completely) Google organic traffic, not other search engines. Since I highly doubt searcher behavior would change so suddenly, I'm trying to figure out why Google is replacing spaces with plus signs. Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | RCF0 -
Google Analytics and DNS change
Our new alumni application is going be tested at domain uva.imodules.com . We are going to collect traffic data with a Google analytics account number UA-884652-XX. So going to uva.imodules.com/myPage.html would send its data to Google Analytics with that account number. Then when it is ready for production we are going to just change the domain name of the application and switch the DNS over to dardencommunity.darden.virginia.edu . So going to dardencommunity.darden.virginia.edu /myPage.html would send its data to Google Analtics with that SAME account number. Aside from having the testing domain data in the same profile are there any other issues/problems we may run into?
Reporting & Analytics | | Darden0 -
Google Analytics - paid & unpaid visits messed up
I guess Google Analytics messes up my paid and unpaid visits. In the list of top 10 kw's sending non-paid traffic it shows 5 very short kw's that we don't rank for at all (checked with RankTracker - we are not in first 50 search results). But these are the kw's we advertise for... One more proof: Webmaster Tools 'Search queries' shows 10 times less 'Clicks' from organic search than Google Analytics. Is there anyone who is experiencing this kind of problems with GA? Is there anything you can do with it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Alexey_mindvalley0