Excluding your own visits, IPs, countries, hostnames, or paths

To refine your analytics data and prevent your own activity or irrelevant traffic from being counted, DataFast offers several exclusion methods.

1. Exclude specific URL paths

• /admin - Excludes only the exact /admin page
• /admin/* - Excludes all pages under /admin (like /admin/users, /admin/settings, /admin/settings/general, etc.) but not the /admin page itself.

1. Go to your Website Settings in DataFast.
2. Navigate to the Exclusions tab.
3. Add the URL paths you want to ignore. DataFast won't track visitors who visit these paths and you won't see them in your analytics.

2. Exclude IP addresses

1. Go to your Website Settings in DataFast.
2. Navigate to the Exclusions tab.
3. Add the IP addresses you want to ignore. DataFast won't track visitors from these IPs and you won't see them in your analytics.

3. Exclude specific countries

You can prevent events from specific countries from being tracked in your analytics. This is useful for filtering out bot-heavy regions or complying with data regulations.

1. Go to your Website Settings in DataFast.
2. Navigate to the Exclusions tab.
3. Select countries from the dropdown to exclude. DataFast won't track visitors from these countries and you won't see them in your analytics.

Common use cases:

• Filter out bot-heavy regions that skew your analytics
• Comply with regional data privacy regulations
• Focus analytics on your target markets only

4. Exclude specific hostnames

You can prevent events from specific hostnames from being tracked. Only the exact hostname will be excluded.

• subdomain.example.com - Excludes only that exact hostname
• example.com - Excludes only the root domain (not subdomains)

1. Go to your Website Settings in DataFast.
2. Navigate to the Exclusions tab.
3. Add the hostnames you want to ignore. DataFast won't track visitors from these hostnames and you won't see them in your analytics.

Common use cases:

• Filter out white-labeled subdomains (e.g., user1.example.com, user2.example.com)
• Exclude staging or test environments
• Exclude internal tools or admin panels

5. Exclude your own visits (browser-based)

To exclude your visits:

1. Visit the website where you want to exclude your visits.
2. Open the developer tools in your browser. (Right-click on the page and select Inspect, or press F12 on Firefox/Chrome, or Option+Command+i on Safari).
3. Go to the "Console" tab.
4. Paste the following command and press Enter:

localStorage.datafast_ignore=true

This needs to be done for each domain/subdomain and for every browser you use for testing.

To re-enable counting of your visits:

1. Visit the website and open the developer console as described above.
2. Paste the following command and press Enter:

delete localStorage.datafast_ignore

Reducing your DataFast usage: a practical example

Let's say you're running a SaaS with 500K monthly pageviews, but you're on a 200K plan. Before upgrading, consider what traffic actually matters to you.

Scenario: You notice in your analytics that:

• 150K pageviews come from your /app/* dashboard (logged-in users)
• 50K pageviews come from /admin/* (your team)
• 100K pageviews come from bot-heavy countries you don't serve
• 200K pageviews come from your marketing site (what you actually care about)

Solution: Exclude the traffic you don't need:

1. Exclude /app/* — You already know who your logged-in users are. You probably track them in your own database. Do you really need pageview analytics for your dashboard?

2. Exclude /admin/* — Internal admin panels don't need analytics tracking.

3. Exclude bot-heavy countries — If you only serve US/EU customers, exclude countries that just inflate your numbers without providing value.

Result: You've gone from 500K to ~200K events/month without losing any meaningful data. You stay on your current plan and save money.