Let's look at how we can identify bot traffic. You have to identify the unwanted website hits and respond. How do we identify the bot traffic within Google Analytics?ĭefending your data against bot traffic is a bit like playing whack-a-mole. Many varieties bots hit our websites, and sometimes we are the ones sending bots to our sites. There's been a noticeable reduction of spam traffic in our analytics reports.īut, spam is just one type of bot traffic that can pollute our analytics data. And since then things have gotten better. When users started threatening to move away from Google Analytics, Google took notice.

Maybe the grass was greener somewhere else? Like many Google Analytics users, I started checking out other analytics products. Google was like Fredo in the Godfather II when it came to defending our data against spam – drastically underachieving!Īnd the community noticed. And for a long time, my take was that Google wasn't doing much to keep the spam traffic out of our analytics reports. Now, I've been pretty outspoken about how Google handles spam traffic. I love Google Analytics… But sometimes their “one size fits all” tool misses the mark. Google Analytics doesn't always block bot traffic In this post, you're going to learn how to: How do you keep the bots out of your Google Analytics reports? Heavy bot traffic (5% of sessions or more) can skew our data, pollute our analytics and ruin typically useful metrics like page value. Why? Because Bots are not real users, and they don't perform like humans.

Whether or not you welcome this bot traffic, 99% of the time you don't want to see bot traffic in your analytics reports.

Or at least bots that we want to visit our websites, for testing, diagnostics, and even monitoring SEO results. Sure, there are spam bots sending hits to our analytics data. We think of it as spam, and we don't want this data anywhere near our reports. Most of the time, bot traffic in our analytics data gets a bad name. Let's talk about bot traffic in Google Analytics.

Google forms spam bot