How do I exclude / ignore my traffic or specific users from being tracked in Matomo?

There are a few ways to tell Matomo (Piwik) to exclude and ignore your traffic:

  • Set the ‘ignore cookie’: Login in Matomo, click « Administration (cog icon) » on the top menu, then in the ‘Personal > Settings’ page click the link below the section ‘Exclude your visits using a cookie’. (a matomo_ignore cookie without expiry date is created on the domain of your Matomo server).
  • You may also ignore all traffic from a given IP address or IP address range or CIDR range (useful if you use one or more static IP addresses): check this faq.
  • You may also exclude all traffic where the requests have particular User Agents.
  • You may also include a Tracking Opt-out feature in your website, and use it to exclude your traffic. (a matomo_ignore cookie without expiry date is created on the domain of your Matomo server).
  • You may also force Matomo to only track visits and Page URLs where the URL belongs to your website domain(s) (useful to ignore traffic on your test/staging/qa instances)
  • You may also create a Segment, and define your custom segment your visits with conditions that exclude specific visits based on one or more conditions. So you would track all visits in Matomo and then use Segments to further exclude visits, for example « Segment and show only visits where User ID is not empty », or « Segment and show only visits where my custom dimension user type is not employee » to exclude only employees with a custom segment based on a custom dimension.
  • You may also define specific requests to be excluded (advanced users only)
  • Alternatively, you may also avoid tracking one or more users that meet your specific criteria by implementing logic yourself in Javascript (or server-side) to hide the tracking code. So that when user(s) meet the criteria and should be excluded from tracking, then your code would ensure to not display the JavaScript Tracking code in your pages or apps. When the tracking code is not output in the page for some users, then these users won’t be tracked.

Note: when you exclude some traffic, it will only exclude it going forward and is not applied retroactively.

If you wanted to delete data that is already tracked, see the FAQ How do I delete specific visits to clean-up some of the data?