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Category: Digital Analytics

Do You Have Bots in Your Google Analytics Data?

June 8, 2012

How to Identify and Block Web Monitoring Bots in Google Analytics

Did you know that if you are using a service like Keynote to monitor your website performance, that it is impacting your web metrics? Services such as Keynote, Gomez, AlertSite, Pingdom, and many others use a real web browser to visit your site repeatedly throughout the day in order to measure load-time performance. They are loading your site from multiple locations throughout the world with real browsers that execute the Google Analytics tracking javascript.

There are various kinds of bots that come to your site (Google Search Bot, Bing, etc) that do not execute javascript tracking code and do not influence your metrics in Google Analytics. Our objective in this post is to educate users about the bots that do execute javascript tracking code and help you provide accurate data to your stakeholders.

For a recent client, we found that these bots were contributing roughly 18,000 visits (and bounces) a month. In other words, it was a noticeable impact on the quality of metrics in Google Analytics.

How to Identify Bot Traffic / Are Bots Influencing Your Metrics?

In order to identify bot traffic, you are going to be looking for groups of visits, by a visitor’s service provider or visitor’s domain dimension that have a 100% (or very close to it) bounce rate and a 100% new visit rate. You’ll want to do your due diligence to ensure that these visits that you find are not the result of a tagging issue on your site . Such as a page that has different tracking settings than another and are causing cookie resets.

The ‘Service Provider’ report in GA provides a great starting point for this analysis. Head over to Standard Reporting > Audience > Technology > Network. Once here, you’ll want to switch to the table view and then apply an advanced filter so that we can look at sizable, high-bounce traffic. In this case, we are filtering the report to only look at bounce rates that are greater than 90% and also have visits greater than 100 during our monthly date range.

Additionally, if you can get a list of IP addresses from the web performance provider, you can exclude based on the IP address that they provide. Note though that these providers change and add new IPs all the time, so I find that this method requires more maintenance. View Google’s IP RegEx tool for more information on IP ranges or multiple IP/ranges and the use of regex in custom filters.

Exclude IP filter

Let us know if you have any questions.

Joe Christopher
About the Author

As Vice President of Analytics at Blast Analytics, Joe leads a team of talented analytics consultants responsible for helping clients understand and take action on their vast amounts of data, to continuously improve and EVOLVE their organizations. With over 20 years of experience in analytics and digital marketing, Joe offers a high-level of knowledge and guidance to clients across all industries. He is an expert in all major analytics platforms including Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, as well as various tag management systems such as Tealium and Adobe Launch. He also consults on data visualization, data governance, and data quality strategies. Having extensive expertise in many areas, has enabled Joe to become a well known thought leader and speak at industry events such as Tealium’s Digital Velocity series. Joe remains on the pulse of various information technology, programming languages, tools and services, keeping Blast and its clients on the leading edge.

Connect with Joe on LinkedIn. Joe Christopher has written on the Blast Digital Customer Experience and Analytics Blog.