Internal Traffic Type | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

Overview

After launch, it’s important to monitor queries to continually improve the experience. However, many queries will come from Administrators and internal client users, effectively blurring what real consumers are searching for and making it harder to know where to prioritize updates.

To address this, Search has a filter for traffic type that is internal. Some users are marked internal automatically and you can add additional users.

Internal Traffic Type

All users who log into the Yext platform will be tracked as “internal” via cookie. For Yext employees, this applies to all Search experiences. For users at the business (i.e. clients and those working on their behalf), this will only apply if the account’s business ID matches the business ID associated with the Search experience.

You can also add IP addresses to the platform such that it identifies any Search traffic from those IP addresses as “Internal”. Any IP addresses marked as internal will not update historical reporting. If you add a new IP address, reporting will only be updated moving forward, not for previous searches conducted by that user.

The filter “Traffic Source: Internal” can be used in multiple places across Search:

  • As a filter or dimension in Report Builder
  • As a filter on the Search Terms screen
  • As a filter on the Search Term Clusters screen

Mark IP Addresses As Internal

To filter internal IP addresses out of Analytics reporting, navigate to the relevant Search experience and go to the IP Filtering screen under the Analysis section. In the code box, input the IP addresses to mark as internal using the syntax below:

{
 "ipFilters": [
    {
      "source": "client_name",
      "address": "IP_address"
    }
  ]
}

Then click Save at the bottom of the page.

To help effectively manage the list of IP addresses, we recommend creating a spreadsheet with a column for ‘List of IPs’ (column A), ‘Source Name’ (column B - you only need to populate cell B2 with the client name), ‘Source Formula’ (column C), and ‘JSON to Copy’ (column D). It should look something like this:

List of IPs Source Name Source Formula JSON to Copy
xx.xxx.xxx.xxx Client Name =IF(ISBLANK(A2), “”, CONCATENATE (“{”“source””:“”“, $B$2, “”“, ““address””:“”“, A2, “”“}”)) =concatenate(“{”“ipFilters””:[“, textjoin(”,“, TRUE, C:C),“]}”)
xx.xxx.xxx.xxx =IF(ISBLANK(A3), “”, CONCATENATE (“{”“source””:“”“, $B$2, “”“, ““address””:“”“, A3, “”“}”))