How to prevent tracking yourself

Whenever you (accidentally) trigger your tracking pixel you will track yourself. This can happen when you open the link to your tracking pixel, or your own email program opens your pixel. You will then see a message that your pixel has collected data from the same IP-address as yours. Obviously, you don't want this to happen. With PastePixel we have two methods on how to prevent / stop this: you can blacklist your own IP-address or pause and enable data collection.

Blacklist your IP-address

You can add your own IP-address to your IP-blacklist. All IP-addresses added to your IP-blacklist will be excluded from all visualizations. Note that when you remove an IP-address from the blacklist, you will be able to see that data again.

There are various ways in which you can add IP-addresses to your IP-blacklist. Go to your My account page > IP-blacklist. Here you will see your IP-blacklist. The add-field will be prefilled with your own IP-address. Then, you must press the "+" button to add your own IP-address to the blacklist. From this overview you can also remove entries.

Alternatively, when you have already tracked yourself and see the message, you can press the link in that message to directly add yourself to the blacklist.

The last way in which you can add entries to your IP-blacklist is from your "Raw data" overview. When you expand an entry, you will see a button "Blacklist IP". Press that button to add the IP-address associated to that entry to the blacklist.

Pause and enable data collection

If you don't want to use the IP-blacklist, you can also use this method to prevent tracking yourself. Most of the times when a user tracks itself, it happens before sending the actual mail. So, what you can you is, before you generate the tracking pixel is initially pausing data collection. You can do that from "Advanced settings" and toggling the setting.

Then, after you have sent out your email, you can resume data collection. That way you can trigger the tracking pixel as many times as you want when you are composing your email, since you won't track any data until after you have resumed data collection.