Exclude data in Adobe Analytics
Excluding data is commonly used to prevent your organization’s testing efforts from populating production data, or to prevent unwanted data from falsely inflating reports. Use any of the following methods to exclude data from Adobe Analytics depending on your use case.
Exclude data post-data collection
The following methods are ways to exclude data in Analytics reporting after Adobe data collection servers receive image requests. Data excluded using these methods still count toward billable server calls.
- Exclude by IP: Adobe Analytics provides basic functionality to exclude data for IP addresses or ranges in a report suite. See Exclude by IP in the Admin user guide.
- Bot rules: Bot rules take traffic from known bot user agent strings and exclude them from Analytics reports. Data excluded via bot rules are placed in the Bots report. Custom bot rules can be created to exclude additional data. See Bot Rules in the Admin user guide.
- VISTA rules: Depending on your organization’s needs, hits that match your requirements are sent to another report suite dedicated to receiving excluded data. VISTA rules are commonly used against IP addresses, but are not limited to them. You can use any dimension to include or exclude data in report suites. VISTA rules are subject to additional costs; contact your Adobe Account Team for details.
- Opt-out cookies: All visitors to your site can voluntarily opt out of being tracked in Adobe Analytics by visiting a page specific to your tracking server. See Implement opt-out links in the Implement user guide.
Exclude data pre-data collection
If you want to prevent certain hits from reaching Analytics data collection servers, use the abort variable. This flag prevents the image request from being sent. Billable server calls are not incremented for aborted image requests, since they don’t reach Adobe data collection servers.