How to avoid being a statistic

When was the last time you, or somebody from your company, visited your web site. It's quite possible that you represent one of the most frequent of returning visitors.

When analysing your traffic via FlySoup you probably don't want your own visits to muddy the figures. To avoid this you need to add your own I.P. address to an exclusion list. You do this by clicking on the '>Exclude IP Ranges From Tracking' link under the 'Account' '>Setup' menu.

Bear in mind if you are accessing your FlySoup stats from different locations - your desk bound office workstation and your laptop at home for example - then you will need to exclude both sets of I.P. addresses.

Your I.P. address is a a series of two and three digit numbers in four groups, separated by full stops. Like this, for example: 195.99.172.141 (an I.P. address that referenced The Equal Opportunities Commission mentioned in an earlier post).

How do you find your I.P. address?

FlySoup makes it easy to find and add the I.P. address of the machine you are currently using to access your stats. For a start it tells you what your I.P address is. So when you click the link to add a new range, simply put in the I.P. address it gives you as a starting address and for your finishing range address use the same number with the last digit increased by one. So if the last number was 141, make it 142.

This is all you need if you are the only one in the company accessing the site. If there are many people in the company who might reasonably be expected to be trawling the site on a regular basis then you will want to make the range wide enough to accommodate all the local I.P. address variants.

Any future traffic from I.P. addresses you have nominated in this way will be ignored and excluded from your stats.

How can I resolve the IP address?

FlySoup is great at collecting data on web site traffic but it stops short of telling you exactly who has visited your site. However you can narrow it down to the domain level.

Often this is of marginal value since the IP address turns out to be a 'pool' address from AOL or BTinternet or some other large grouping.

Nevertheless, if the domain name is registered to a company or individual this will show up in the latest visitors report. Even then, this will often be expressed as a series of numbers separated by dots as in 195.99.172.141.

In this particular example the numbers resolve to The Equal Opportunities Commission. Check it for yourself with a piece of free trial software that converts IP numbers to their physical location at http://www.ip2location.com/free.asp

ip2location's primary use is for geo-location, allowing you to do things like: display pages in a native language or currency, filtering access from countries you don't or won't do business with and spam filtering by location.