IP Filtering: Exclude IP addresses or ranges from your results

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  • Optimizely Web Experimentation
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Optimizely Web Experimentation offers two separate filtering tools under Settings > Advanced. They solve different problems, so it helps to know which one you need:

  • Results Filtering removes specific IP addresses from your results pages. Matching visitors are still tracked and still count toward your monthly active users (MAU). You do not see them in the numbers. Use this to keep your own team's testing activity out of your metrics.
  • Filter User Agents and IPs stops Optimizely from tracking specific visitors. When a visitor matches, the Optimizely snippet sends no events for them, so they consume no MAU and never appear in your data. Use this to keep bots, scrapers, and other unwanted traffic out.

Results Filtering (IP filtering)

IP filtering lets you exclude certain IP ranges from showing up in your experiment results. This is also how you can exclude yourself or your company from experiment results.

IP Filtering does not prevent you from seeing an experiment. It filters you and your actions out from the results page. To exclude IP ranges from being included in experiments, see IP Address Audience conditions.

IP filtering is done at the project level. If you have a staging server and a live page, keep them in separate projects so you do not turn IP filtering on and off repeatedly.

To access IP Filtering, go to Settings > Advanced. Under Results Filtering, enter the IP(s) that you do not want to be counted in your experiment results.

You can use a regular expression (regex) to match multiple IPs, but your IP filtering regex must match the full IP address to work properly. Partial matches will not work. See Set up multiple IPs to be filtered for information. If you have turned on anonymize visitor IP addresses as well, the IP Filtering regex should match the last octet as 0 (zero).

The IP filtering option lets you exclude as many IPs as necessary in a single line. Bear in mind that you should be using your public IP address.

The IP Filter has a max character limit of 1500.

IP filtering applies when you review the results page, regardless of when the experiment or campaign started. Even if experiments or campaigns are already running before you add IP filtering to the project, the filter is applied when you view the results page.

Set up multiple IPs to be filtered

If you are filtering just one IP address, you can enter it normally. If you need to enter multiple IPs, you can also use regex. To separate multiple IP addresses, add a vertical pipe (|) between them. You are not required to use any special characters if you are entering a single address.

An example of an IP filter for two IP addresses is: ^34\.1\.213\.45$|^90\.100\.5\.73$

Your regex must follow the regex library Google uses.

Separate any additional IPs with a |. You can add any number of IP addresses, up to the 1,500-character limit.

Set up an IP filter range

You can use regex to create an IP range without entering every address.

For example, to filter the IP range 206.23.100.50 to 206.23.100.150, use a regex range instead of listing every address. The regex looks like this: ^206\.23\.100\.([5-9][0-9]|1([0-4][0-9]|50))$

You can use the IP range regex generator to create regex-formatted IP ranges.

Filter User Agents and IPs

The Filter User Agents and IPs section lets you block specific visitors from being tracked by Optimizely Web Experimentation. When a visitor matches a User Agent string or IP address you have added here, the Optimizely snippet does not send any events for that visitor or bot.

Because no events are sent, matching visitors consume no MAU and do not appear anywhere in your experiment data. This is different from Results Filtering, which only hides traffic from the results page after it has already been tracked and counted. Use Filter User Agents and IPs to stop bots, scrapers, and other unwanted traffic. This keeps automated traffic from inflating your visitor counts and skewing experiment results.

Add a filter

  1. Go to Settings > Advanced and find Filter User Agents and IPs.

  2. In a row, enter a User Agent string, an IP address, or both.
  3. Click + Add Row to add another filter.
  4. To remove a filter, click Remove rule for that row.
  5. Click Save to apply the new settings.

IP addresses are matched by their /24 block. Enter the network address ending in 0. For example, to block 123.123.123.x, enter 123.123.123.0.