Exclude traffic
Sometimes you don’t want certain hits in your reports: your own visits while you build the site, traffic from a staging environment, or hits from your office. Add exclusion rules in your site’s settings and Snow will ignore any hit that matches.
Exclusions are enforced when an event arrives, so a matching hit is dropped silently: it’s never written to your data and never appears in any report.
Exclusions apply to new events only. They don’t remove hits that were already recorded before you added the rule.
Rule types
You can add four kinds of rule. A hit is excluded if it matches any rule, in any dimension.
| Type | Matches | Example |
|---|---|---|
| IP address | An exact IPv4 or IPv6 address. | 203.0.113.7 |
| Path | A URL path. Supports a * wildcard. | /admin/* |
| Hostname | An exact hostname (case-insensitive). | staging.example.com |
| Country | An ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code. | US |
A few details that matter:
- IP is an exact match: one address per rule. Ranges and CIDR notation aren’t supported, so add each address you want to exclude.
- Path rules must start with
/. The*wildcard matches any run of characters, so/admin/*excludes/admin/usersand/admin/settings, while a bare/adminmatches only that exact path. Paths are case-sensitive. - Hostname is matched exactly but case doesn’t matter.
- Country uses two-letter codes like
US,GB, orDE.
Exclude your own visits
The most common use is keeping your own traffic out. Add an IP address rule for your network:
198.51.100.42Finding your IP. When you open the exclusions settings, Snow shows you the IP address you’re currently connecting from, so you can add it in one click, no need to look it up. You can also search the web for “what is my IP” to see the same address.
Exclude an admin area
To keep internal pages out of your reports, add a path rule with the *
wildcard:
/admin/*This drops every hit under /admin/. The same approach works for any section you
don’t want measured, such as a /preview/* area, internal tools, and so on.
Exclude a staging site
If a staging or preview environment shares the same Site ID as production, add a hostname rule for it so its traffic doesn’t mix into your real numbers:
staging.example.com