Blocking your own hits on your website is generally speaking a good idea as you won’t behave as your “normal” visitors would ending up in skewed KPIs (e.g. conversion rate)

There are a number of (complicated) ways to block your internal traffic but the solution I’ve ended up using is fairly easy.

How to block internal traffic with a cookie

I use a Google Tag Manager Tag that writes a first party cookie setting a parameter internal=true when a specific URL (in my case /internal) is called.

This parameter is then saved to a macro that I can call in a trigger and thus making it possible to introduce a blocking trigger for the Google Analytics Tags.

Check out the whole process in this how-to video

The code for Google Tag Manager

<script>
function setCookie(cname, cvalue, exdays) {
    var d = new Date();
    d.setTime(d.getTime() + (exdays*24*60*60*1000));
    var expires = "expires="+d.toUTCString();
    document.cookie = cname + "=" + cvalue + "; " + expires;
}
setCookie("internal", true, 36500);
</script>