One common question Beam users often ask is how can they block Beam counting their own IP address as a page view, or them as a unique visitor. This is a good question because if you’re visiting your own web domain a lot, you might be distorting your data. When you're working on your site, you might not want to record your own visits and page views.
Most web analytics tools do this by excluding certain IP addresses from being counted. But because we want to stay GDPR compliant, we don’t store the IP addresses of visitors in our database.
To block page views from your Beam dashboard, you can use an ad-blocking browser extension. Below are the steps on how to make this work for some of the most common ad-blockers.
Adblock Plus and AdGuard
When using Adblock Plus or Adguard, just follow the steps below to exclude your stats from being counted by Beam.
1. Go to into the settings
Adblock Plus - click on ‘Advanced’ Adguard - click on ‘User Rules’
2. Add the following rule
In the Advanced section down the bottom, there’s a ‘My Filter List’ section. Here, add the following rule:
||beamanalytics.b-cdn.net^$script,domain=yourdomain.com
where yourdomain.com is the domain name where you installed Beam.
By doing this, you have now blocked Beam from counting your own IP address for this domain. If you have multiple domains using Beam, don’t forget to repeat this process for each domain.
Hope this helps! If you have any questions, let us know at hi@beamanalytics.io. Take care!