How to Remove Test Users from Analytics

Navigate to the Website screen of your ListenLayer account and add your website domain name. Then copy the Website Script to place on your website using Google Tag Manager.

Create a Custom HTML Tag inside of Google Tag Manager that fires on All Pages. Place the tracking script from your ListenLayer account. A sample is shown here, but you must use the code from your account, not this example code!

Enable the URL Parameters Listener and then navigate to the Features screen. Enable the Custom Data Layer Values Feature and the Browser Storage Feature.

Under the Global Settings, open the Custom Data Layer Variables screen and define a variable that you will hold a value inside of to identify test users in the data layer.

Navigate to Browser Storage under Global Settings. Create a record for the Browser Storage element you want to store your test users’ information. In our example, we use a Session Storage Key. In addition, you can choose to set a First Party Cookie or use Local Storage, depending on your situation.

You will use Browser Storage to save a value that identifies a user as a test. Then, you can get this value inside of GTM to use it in your variables, triggers, and tags.

Create a new rule under Custom Values inside the URL Parameters Listener. In our example, we have chosen to use a Simple Rule.

Define the Condition you want to meet to identify a test user. In this case, we are simply looking for a URL parameter “test” to contain 1.

Now, define the value you want to use to identify test users. This will be stored inside of the data layer variable that we created a few steps before this.

You could identify the URL parameter directly in GTM by setting it as a variable; however, this limits our flexibility significantly. For example, what if we want to use 2 different methods to identify test users, this being only one of them. In that situation, we would use multiple rules to define the value of this variable, adding flexibility and power to our configuration.

Navigate to Browser Storage inside the URL Parameters Listener and create a rule. Next, select the correct rule type based on whether you are using a Cookie, Session Storage, or Local Storage.

Then, define a condition similar to what you used in the Custom Data Layer Value.

Next, create the value you will push into the Browser Storage when the condition is met.

When we identify a test user, we surface the information in the Data Layer and Browser Storage.  Depending on your situation, you will likely not need both of these, but we have configured both in this Use Case as a point of illustration.

Make sure to publish your ListenLayer changes so you can test them!

After publishing ListenLayer, test your Data Layer Variable using the URL parameter “test=1,” and you should see your rule at work!

Next, test your browser storage by navigating to the Application in your browser inspector.  You should find your storage key or cookie name under the appropriate Browser Storage medium.

Now that your data layer has information about test users, we need to make this available inside of Google Tag Manager as a variable.  This will allow us to use the information to filter test users out of our conversion and analytics tag activity.

Create a new variable inside of Google Tag Manager and select Data Layer Variable as the type. Then place the path to the variable in the Data Layer Variable Name. Name and save the variable.

You can also capture Cookie values or Local Storage and Session Storage values inside of Google Tag Manager.

For Cookies, use the 1st Party Cookie variable type in GTM, and enter the name of your cookie (see screenshot).

For Local Storage or Session Storage, write a simple script to get your values. You can read more about this example, taken from Simo Ahava’s excellent tutorial here.