Exclude IP Addresses from VWO Tracking

Overview of Excluding IP Addresses from VWO Tracking

Excluding IP addresses from VWO tracking helps prevent internal, test, or non-target traffic from impacting your experiment and analytics data. By filtering out specific IP addresses, you ensure that VWO reports reflect only genuine visitor behavior, resulting in more accurate and reliable insights.

The IP Addresses to Exclude section in the Privacy Center of the VWO application allows you to specify certain individual IP addresses, regular expressions, or IP address ranges that you do not wish to track. However, these excluded IP addresses can access VWO Testing, Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys, Goals, or Funnels without any interruption. VWO excludes activity from these IP addresses from reports, preventing data skew and ensuring that reports reflect only the behavior of intended visitors. Using IP address ranges is ideal for excluding large blocks of known or internal traffic while keeping configuration simple and precise.

Understand IP Address Exclusion in VWO

VWO allows you to exclude visitor traffic based on individual IP addresses, regular expressions, or IP address ranges. 

The following sections outline the format and matching behavior for individual IP addresses, regular expressions, and IP ranges, and the steps to configure them in your VWO account.

How VWO Matches Individual IP Addresses

When you add an individual IP address to be excluded, VWO checks whether a visitor’s IP contains the entered value rather than looking for an exact match. This means the visitor is excluded if the entered value appears anywhere within their IP address. The entire IP address does not need to match exactly. 

For example: 

• IPv4: If you enter 8.8.8.5, VWO excludes any IPv4 address that contains this value, such as 8.8.8.5, 18.8.8.5, 28.8.8.5, 8.8.8.50, or 8.8.8.51.
• IPv6: If you enter 2401:4900:60f3, VWO excludes any IPv6 address that contains this value, such as r601:2401:4900:60f3::8a2f or 2401:4900:60f3::8a2e:abcd.

VWO applies the same matching logic to both IPv4 and IPv6 address formats.

Because VWO uses a contains-based match, you can exclude multiple related individual IP addresses, such as those from your office network. This makes sure that internal traffic is not included in your VWO experiment data.

How VWO Matches IP Addresses Using Regular Expressions

When you want to exclude an exact IP address, VWO lets you use regular expressions to define a precise match instead of a contains-based match. 

For example:

• IPv4: If you enter the regular expression ^8.8.8.5$, VWO excludes only the IPv4 address 8.8.8.5, which is an exact match.
• IPv6: If you enter the regular expression ^2401:4900:60f3:229d:acb4:23a2:fadc:8b72$, VWO excludes only the IPv6 address 2401:4900:60f3:229d:acb4:23a2:fadc:8b72, which is an exact match.

VWO uses regular expressions to exclude multiple IP addresses that match a defined pattern. To help build and validate your IP regular expression, you can use the IP Range Regular Expression Builder or any other similar tool available online. 

How VWO Matches IP Address Ranges

When you want to exclude a continuous set of IP addresses, VWO uses IP address ranges to match and exclude traffic without relying on regular expressions. Using this method, you can define a start and end IP address, and VWO excludes every IP address between them, including both the starting and ending IP addresses.

For example:

• IPv4: If you specify the start IP address as 192.168.0.1 and the end IP address as 192.168.0.150, VWO excludes all IPv4 addresses from 192.168.0.1 through 192.168.0.150 (both endpoints inclusive).
• IPv6: If you specify the start IP address as 2401:4900:60f3::1 and the end IP address as 2401:4900:60f3::ff, VWO excludes all IPv6 addresses from 2401:4900:60f3::1 through 2401:4900:60f3::ff (both endpoints inclusive).

Exclude IP Addresses from VWO Tracking

This section explains the prerequisites and the steps to exclude IP addresses from VWO tracking. 

Prerequisites

Before you begin, you must have Admin access to the main workspace to add or edit IP addresses for exclusion. Users with Publish or Browse access can view the exclusion list but cannot modify it.

Steps to Exclude IP Addresses from VWO Tracking:

Follow the steps below to exclude IP addresses from VWO tracking:

1. Log in to your VWO account.
2. Click the Profile icon in the top-right corner and select Settings.
3. Navigate to Accounts > Privacy Center.
4. Scroll down to the IP Addresses to Exclude section, and choose the appropriate exclusion method:
   • Multi Line or Regex: To exclude individual IP addresses or IP addresses defined using regular expressions:
     
     
      
     1. In the text box, enter one or more individual IP addresses or regular expressions, with each entry on a new line.
     2. Click Add to list to save the entries.
   • Range: To exclude a continuous range of IP addresses by specifying a start and end IP:
     
     
      
     1. Enter the IP Start and IP End values in the respective text boxes.
     2. Click Add to list to save the range.

Remove an Excluded IP Address

Follow steps 1-4 mentioned in the Exclude IP Addresses from VWO Tracking section above.
 All currently excluded individual IP addresses, regular expressions, and IP ranges are listed at the top of this section.



Click the icon corresponding to the IP address or range you want to remove. A confirmation toast message is displayed once it is successfully removed from the list.

Keeping your IP exclusion list updated ensures that only relevant visitor data is tracked, leading to cleaner insights and more reliable experimentation results.

Need more help?

For further assistance or more information, contact VWO Support.