Anonymize Visitor IP Addresses Stored by Optimizely Web Experimentation and Optimizely Performance Edge

  • Updated
  • Optimizely Web Experimentation
  • Optimizely Performance Edge
Optimizely Performance Edge is a lightweight experimentation product that delivers significantly faster performance than previous versions of Optimizely Web Experimentation. It does this by relying on a streamlined "microsnippet" which limits the range of available features.

Optimizely Performance Edge and Optimizely Web Experimentation anonymize IP addresses the same way, so all information contained in this article applies to experiments created with either version.

You can configure Optimizely Web Experimentation or Optimizely Performance Edge to anonymize your visitors' IP addresses before they are stored in our event logs. When you have IP anonymization enabled, Optimizely Web Experimentation or Optimizely Performance Edge will not store the full visitor IP address anywhere and will be unable to retrieve it later. For IPv4 addresses, the last octet of the IP address changes into a 0 (zero) for all tracking calls made to Optimizely Web Experimentation or Optimizely Performance Edge. For IPv6 addresses, the low 64 bits are zeroed out.

IP Anonymization can be configured at the project or account level.

  • Project Level – After creation, IP anonymization may be enabled or disabled for specific projects or snippets, unless the account-level setting is locked (see below). The setting may only be changed at the project after the project is created.
  • Account Level – Each account has an ip_anonymization_default value that dictates whether IP anonymization is enabled automatically for new projects. This setting is set to “true” (i.e., enabled) when your account is first created, but can be adjusted to “false”. In addition, the setting can be “locked” by the account administrator, so that no project or snippet’s IP anonymization setting may be changed.
    Once locked, you cannot unlock the setting without contacting Optimizely Support.

Project-level IP anonymization

If you want to configure IP anonymization on a project-by-project basis, you can do that in Project Settings for the relevant product:

Account-level IP anonymization

If you want to configure IP anonymization at the account level, follow these steps:

  1. Go to Account Settings > Security and Privacy and scroll down to IP Anonymization Settings.

    Accounts-21.png

  2. Enabling Anonymize by default will automatically anonymize IP addresses for new projects. If you want to lock the setting permanently, click to enable Lock this setting permanently. You cannot undo this action yourself once saved. You will need to contact Optimizely's support team to change this setting.
  3. Click Save.