In this knowledgebase article, we’re going to walk you through how to anonymize IPs in Google Analytics addresses using Rank Math.
Table of Contents
1 Why Anonymize IP Addresses in Google Analytics?
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) considers IP addresses as Personally Identifiable Information (PII). And Google Analytics records the IP addresses by default. As a result, you need to keep your visitors informed about the data being collected.
Rank Math offers you an alternate option to anonymize IP addresses that get recorded in Google Analytics. This is done by masking the last octet of the IP address, hence the full IP address never gets recorded in Google Analytics.
2 How to Anonymize IPs With Google Analytics Using Rank Math
Rank Math makes it extremely easy to anonymize IP addresses with Google Analytics.
Let’s take a look at how you can do this.
2.1 Enable the Analytics Module
At first, ensure that you’ve enabled the Analytics module by navigating to Rank Math SEO → Dashboard as shown below:
2.2 Connect Your Google Account
The next step is to connect your Google account. If you’re doing this for the very first time then we recommend you to read our tutorial on how to install Google Analytics with Rank Math SEO.
Once you’ve connected the Google Analytics, enable the Install analytics code option from Rank Math SEO → General Settings → Analytics as shown below. Once you have enabled it, the other options that Rank Math provides will pop up.
2.3 Enable Anonymize IP addresses
You can then enable the Anonymize IP addresses option which is a Rank Math PRO feature as shown below:
Once you set anonymization of IP, the last three digits of your visitor’s IP address are automatically deleted and changed to zeros. This changes or modifies the last octet of IPv4 user IP addresses and the last 80 bits of IPv6 addresses to zeros.
For example, if a visitor has got an IP address of 192.168. 255.255 and it is tracked by Google Analytics, IP anonymization feature will help in anonymizing/ masking the IP to 192.168.255.0.
And that’s it! If you still have any questions you’re always more than welcome to contact our dedicated support team. They are available 24/7, 365 days a year…