Ignoring your hits
On a small site you are often your own biggest visitor. Every draft preview, every check that the footer still looks right, every reload after a deploy — none of it is traffic, and all of it is loud enough to bend a chart. Tinylytics gives you two ways to deal with that: a flag you set in your own browser, and rules that drop traffic before it is ever recorded.
Ignore this browser
Visit your live site once with the flag on the end of the URL:
https://your-site.com?tiny_ignore=true
If underscores are awkward wherever you are typing, ?ti=true does exactly the same thing. Include the https:// so your browser navigates rather than searching.
Tinylytics writes a flag into that browser’s localStorage and confirms it did. From then on, that browser is invisible to your own analytics and nobody else is affected. Because the flag lives in local storage, it is per browser and per device — so do it again in the browser you use on your phone, and again in whichever one you keep open for testing.
To start counting yourself again:
https://your-site.com?tiny_ignore=false
Clearing site data for that origin has the same effect.
There is also ?ignore on the embed URL itself, which stops that particular page load from ever sending a hit. It is handy in a staging template or a layout you know you will be reloading all afternoon.
Ignore rules
Ignore rules are for noise that will keep arriving whether or not you are looking: an /admin area, a preview host, your own site appearing as its own referrer, a country whose bot traffic you have stopped finding interesting. Set them under Settings → Ignore rules, which is also linked from Settings → Tracking.
Ignored hits are not hidden, they are never recorded. They stay out of Overview and out of the CSV export of all hits. That is worth knowing before you write a broad rule, because there is nothing to recover afterwards. Note that plenty of junk never reaches this stage at all — Cloudflare, the collector’s rate limits, and spam detection all sit in front of it.
Ignore your IP addresses
The browser flag has to be set once per browser, which gets tedious across a laptop, a phone, and a tablet on the same Wi-Fi. If you would rather leave out everything from your home or office network, list those addresses under Settings → Ignore rules → IP addresses, one per line. The panel shows the address you are visiting from right now. Add my IP adds it and saves in one click, and it also asks ipify for your other address, because many connections use both IPv4 and IPv6 and your visits can arrive over either. The lookup happens in your browser, only when you click, and ipify says it logs nothing.
203.0.113.7
2001:db8:1234::/48
A plain address matches that address only. A range in CIDR notation matches everything inside it, which is the better choice for IPv6, where your provider usually hands you a whole block and the exact address your devices use keeps changing. Your router or your provider’s account page will usually show that prefix. Ranges wider than /8 for IPv4 or /32 for IPv6 are refused, because they would ignore most of the internet along with you.
IP rules only apply to visits that arrive after you save them. Tinylytics never stores an IP address on a hit, so there is nothing to match against your existing data. If your address changes, update the list; an old address that someone else now holds will keep being ignored until you remove it.
Ignore paths or segments?
The two look similar and mean opposite things. An ignored path throws the traffic away. A segment keeps every hit and simply gives you a named view of that part of the site. So: ignore what you never want to see again, and segment what you want to look at separately.