Whether spam bots are malicious or not, they can severely interfere with your genuine user data in Google Analytics. It is important to prevent Google Analytics from capturing bot data so you can see how your website is truly performing.
How can I recognise bot traffic?
Sign into your Google Analytics account and navigate to Audience > Technology > Network Here, you can see every Internet Service Provider (ISP) that have viewed your website over the selected time frame.
Once in this view, we can start identifying ISPs that are more than likely bots. Indicators that strongly indicate a bot are a high bounce rate (95%+), 00:00:00 avg. session duration and 1 page / session. If a network matches all of these conditions over a large sample size, we can consider them to be bots. It is possible that a single user could behave like this, however if such behaviour takes place over a large sample size (100+ sessions) from the same ISP, we can consider this bot traffic.
Tackling the Bots
Before we learn how to combat the pesky bot traffic, you should consider implementing a multi-view system in Google Analytics. You can read our blog which explains how to do this and why it is important.
Google Analytics includes a built-in function which allows you to remove some bots from your data. If you navigate to Admin Settings > View Settings, you will see a tick box entitled ‘Bot Filtering’. You should check this box which filters out all ‘known’ bots and spiders’. The keyword here is ‘known’. Google Analytics can’t filter out all the spam bots alone, which leaves some more work for us!
In the earlier section, ‘How can we Recognise Bot Traffic?’, we learnt how to find ISPs that are essentially sending bot traffic to our website. Well, we can use this data with filters to remove these bots from our Google Analytics data.
Navigate to Admin Settings > Filters. Here, you can view your current filters and add new ones too. Click the new filter button and give it an appropriate name. The next settings allow us to define the network(s) we wish to exclude. There are various ways to do this, including using Regular Expressions (REGEX). Don’t worry if you don’t know how to write REGEX though, we can use the ISP information we found earlier.
Click on the ‘Custom’ filter type. Check exclude and change the Filter Field to ‘ISP Organisation’. Now all we have to do is enter the network into the ‘Filter Pattern’ box. For this we need to reference the data found earlier in Technology > Network. Take the name of the ‘Service Provider’ that matches the criteria for bots we laid out earlier.
You can verify the filter to see how it would’ve altered your data had it been in place over the last 7 days and to make sure it is working properly. You should repeat this process for all the bots you have found on your Network page.
Mission complete!
One important note is that you should not use more than one ‘include’ filter, as Google Analytics will effectively be unable to capture any website traffic. We therefore recommend using only ‘exclude’ filters.
Final Thoughts
Some bots aren’t captured by Google Analytics, but by following these steps we can trust that the data being viewed is genuine visitor data!
Let us know your thoughts on tackling spam bot traffic in Google Analytics. If you are interested in website support, please do get in touch!
By Joe Timms
Marketing and Data Analyst.
