Semalt: Excluding Rigor Monitoring Stations From Web Analytics

Nik Chaykovskiy, the Senior Customer Success Manager of Semalt, says that using Real Browser Checks is an excellent way to monitor a website performance and manage the total customer experience. Rigor is a company that helps with these checks by making sure that it monitors the client's website in a real browser. The reason why Rigor does this is to see how much time the page takes to load on the user's browser. It also includes all third-party files such as social widgets, data feeds, ad networks, analytics, and CDNs.

Website owners should also take note of the common causes of slow page loads. Apart from infections by malware, Trojans, and viruses, third-party elements can lead to slow loading. They do add value to the site, but for a performance-oriented website, it should watch out for these imported codes. Research has shown that these third-party elements may delay a full-page load by up to a minute. It is important to offer some of the services that come together with these additional features. Nevertheless, they come at a cost, and it is up to the owner to determine those that are integral to the site and those that are not. The best strategy to conduct this efficiently is to carry out a cost-benefit analysis on all third-party features.

Since Rigor downloads all the contents of a page on every level of website monitoring, one will need to exclude all the traffic generated by the monitoring stations. Otherwise, they may lead to Google Analytics tabulating skewed results. There is a procedure to follow to ensure that the user excludes all traffic from the monitoring stations. The most common analytic platform used for this is Google Analytics.

The steps employed in Google Analytics are universal. It means that it does not matter which analytic platform one uses, the guide is the same for all. For this article, we will demonstrate this using the Google Analytics platform, which is common to most websites.

Here is what one needs to do:

• Log in to the Google Analytics software
• On opening, locate the Admin tab, which brings you a list of profiles to choose.
• Select the appropriate profile. In this case, Rigor would be the best choice.
• Click on Filters tab from the sub-selection given
• Choose a +New filter to create a custom filter for the site.

On reaching this point, one may have to go through the list of monitoring stations that Rigor currently has in place. They provide a full list of Rigor locations with their monitoring stations, with their IP address, region code, and the role assigned to it. Once the identification of the IP addresses is complete, go back to Google Analytics to finish the custom filters.

Under the new filter, navigate to the "Add Filter to Profile."

• Check the box with the prompt asking whether to create a new filter.
• In the filter information, the filter name should include the location of the monitoring station, check the predefined filter in the filter type. Enter the IP addresses of the Real Browser monitoring stations.

There is no point of excluding the central or content stations since they do not appear in the overall analytics. After all, this is complete, all traffic from the monitoring stations does not appear in the reports.