

Removing Bots in Google Analytics is Not Enough The setting is a helpful tool, but it is not a bot management solution. In short: Other methods are preferred for removing bot traffic from Google Analytics.Įssentially, the “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders” checkbox is the only practical way of removing known bot traffic from your Google Analytics data. Therefore, hits from the excluded referral source will still show up as direct traffic, possibly skewing your data worse than before. It just means that the hits get stripped of their referral information. bot-traffic.xyz, bottraffic.live, bottrafic.live, bot-traffic.icu, or trafficbot.live) does not mean that hits from the source won’t be tracked. A common bot tactic is to spread their requests across a vast number of different IP addresses, including residential IPs, to appear less suspicious than hundreds of hits from the same IP address.įinally, using the referral exclusion list is the least reliable option. Also, bots are always getting better at imitating humans. A popular website might have too much suspicious-looking traffic to manually evaluate and filter out. Option two, manually identifying and excluding bots through filters is a lot less practical and reliable. However, bots that are not on the list will still go undetected. The first method is useful, easy to implement (check a box and forget it), and will ensure that all bots on the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s International Spiders & Bots List are excluded from your Google Analytics data. What are the limitations of ‘google analytics bot filtering’? So if you’ve identified suspicious domains, you can remove them from your future data by adding them to this list. This list gives you the ability to exclude domains from your Google Analytics data. You can use the Referral Exclusion List, which you can find under Tracking Info in the Property column of the Admin section. Exclude suspicious domains from your data If so, then apply it to your Master View.ģ. You can create a filter to exclude any suspicious traffic you’ve identified by creating a new View in which you will un check your bot setting and add a filter that excludes suspicious traffic using variables such as city, IP, ISP, HostName, SourceName, etc.

Create filters and apply them to your Master View It will not change any of the data you collected up to this point.Ģ. NOTE: Checking this option will only remove bots from new data starting from the point the box is checked onward. There are three ways you can remove bot traffic from your Google Analytics data:īy far the easiest way is to go to View Settings in the Admin section and simply check the “exclude all hits from known bots and spiders” option.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS TRAFFICBOT HOW TO
How to Exclude Bot Traffic From Google Analytics Then select Source as the primary dimension and search for “bot.” You might be surprised at what you find.


Go to the Acquisition tab of Google Analytics and select Source/Medium under All Traffic. Sometimes unconcealed and/or less sophisticated bots will be easily searchable in Google Analytics, because the word “bot” will be in the SourceName. The same goes for sessions that only ever include one page per session, traffic from strange locations, and browser dimensions that are “not set.”Īnything out of the ordinary is probably bot traffic. Only bots could produce such an absolute number for a metric. For example, it’s not normal to have a 0% or a 100% bounce rate on a page with traffic. If there’s no obvious reason for a drastic traffic spike, chances are it’s bot traffic. As you’re reviewing your data, look for traffic spikes that are not associated with any business reason (such as the launch of a new product or marketing campaign). How to Identify Bot traffic in Google Analyticsīad bot traffic in your Google Analytics data often stands out as unusual.
