Web Marketing Pro Blog

Users of Google Analytics (GA) should be familiar with how to create a cookie in a web browser (and a corresponding custom filter in GA) to exclude internal visitors from GA reports. If not, see this post.

When you use a special webpage to create the cookie, you can go look at your browser’s cookie files to make sure the cookie is actually there. If it’s not there, your GA filter is not going to work.

If you use Firefox, you can find cookie files in Tools > Options > Privacy > Cookies > View Cookies.

If you use IE6 — or IE7 on Windows XP — you can find cookie files under Internet Options > General > Temporary Internet Files > View Files.

But, if you are using IE7 on Windows Vista, cookies are not stored in the same place. The confusing part is that you can still open the familiar Temporary Internet Files folder — using Internet Options > General > Browsing history (click on the Settings button) > Temporary Internet Files and History Settings > Temporary Internet Files > View Files.

This opens the folder C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files. And you will find some cookie files there. But you will not find any of your GA filter cookies.

The cookies you are looking for will be in this directory:
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies

Or, more likely, if you are running IE in protected mode on Windows Vista (which is the default), the cookies you want will be here:
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies\Low

Now you can open the cookie for the domain you are tracking to make sure it contains the custom text or “filter pattern” you specified.

Thanks to Ian Thomas at Lies, Damned Lies for his great post on this topic.

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