Documentation

Ignore your own visits

Keep your own browsing out of your numbers with #oa-ignore, per browser, with nothing to install.

Keep your own visits out

Your own visits, refreshing a page while you build it, clicking around to check something, are real pageviews, and on a quiet site they can be most of them. Open Analytics can exclude the browser you work in, so the numbers are your visitors and not you. There is nothing to install and no account setting: it is a flag the tracker reads, set from the address bar.

Exclude this browser

Add #oa-ignore to any page of your site

Visit any page on your site with #oa-ignore on the end of the URL. The tracker sets a flag in this browser and, from then on, installs nothing and sends nothing here.

in the address bar
https://yoursite.com/#oa-ignore

Watch for the confirmation

A short notice appears in the corner, "this browser is now excluded from analytics", so you know it took. A flag nobody can see is a flag nobody trusts, so the confirmation is the whole point.

Start counting this browser again

The opposite flag clears it. Visit any page with #oa-unignore and a matching notice confirms the browser is being counted again.

in the address bar
https://yoursite.com/#oa-unignore

How it works, and its edges

It is per browser, and it never leaves it

The flag lives in this browser's storage and never reaches our servers. There is no central list of excluded devices, by design: exclusion is a property of the browser profile that set it, exactly like the class-standard plausible_ignore. Set it once per browser and per profile you browse your own site from.
A browser that cannot persist the flag keeps being counted, the honest failure for a mechanism whose whole store is local. Two cases: a private window (Safari private mode does not persist it), and a site running in strict storage mode (data-storage="none", see script options), which has no exclusion flag at all for the same reason.

Common questions