Margie Barkley: How to spot bot traffic in Google Analytics and fix it

In recent years, the issue of bot traffic in Google Ads or other paid campaigns has gained a lot of attention. Elon Musk raised the bot issue on Twitter in this year. It’s now a public issue. Google Analytics makes it easy to spot bot traffic. It is difficult to determine what’s going on. It can be difficult to know which bots are good and which ones are bad. You’ve likely heard about bot traffic, and how it needs to be blocked. How do you find it in Google Analytics, though? What does this bot traffic do on your site? How can you stop this bot traffic?

Bot traffic is defined as:

Bots are scripts which automate processes and tasks online. Bots can perform a wide range of tasks. They may scrape your content or spam your comments or click on your paid advertising campaigns.

It has been estimated that 40% of all internet traffic is automated. Bots are a common problem.

Sometimes, we’d like bots to crawl through our website. Your website would not appear in the Google search results if bots weren’t there. Your keyword research would also not work as well without bots.

You don’t want these good bots to be blocked. You may want to exclude these bots from your Google Analytics data.

Some bots can cause a lot of trouble. Spam bots can mess up site traffic, marketing analytics and other data.

Learn more about bot traffic on our blog. {What is Bot Traffic? | ClickCease Academy”, “description”: “Learn what is bot traffic and how to block it https://bit.ly/3imYBp3 Bot traffic: non-human traffic to a website or an app, coming through organic or paid traffic. Bots and web crawlers are an important part in the global web ecosystem. More than half of internet traffic is automated. But – there are good bots, and bad bots. Good bots can perform useful tasks, such as: delivering your search results; collecting marketing and performance data; automating repetitive tasks; providing automated customer service. Bots are also used to carry out malicious activities and can go undetected. Bots are used for many things, including: Viruses and malware (including ransomware) – Credit Card Fraud – Account Takeover and brute-force attacks – Click fraud and Ad Fraud – where bots click on your ads and fraudulent websites can boost payouts. It’s data time! Cybercrime accounts for over $1 trillion in lost revenue annually, with ad fraud and click fraud being the biggest contributor to this (https://cybersecurityventures.com/cybercrime-damages-6-trillion-by-2021/). Fake traffic on PPC ads accounted for 41 billion dollars worth of losses in the marketing industry in 2021 alone (https://www.clickcease.com/blog/who-is-making-money-from-ad-fraud/). Compare this with credit card fraud which was responsible for the theft of $31 billion in the same year (https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170711-credit-card-fraud-what-you-need-to-know). Bad bots affect us all, whether we are aware of it or not. Protecting our ads and website from malicious bot traffic has become a necessity for marketers to keep themselves and their customers safe online. Check out our ClickCease blog to get a deeper dive into bot traffic https://bit.ly/3imYBp3 Want to know more about ClickCease and get a 7-day free trial? Click here https://www.clickcease.com/”, “thumbnailUrl”: “https://i.ytimg.com/vi/s5Rj1EIU23c/default.jpg”, “uploadDate”: “2022-12-01T14:18:59Z”, “duration”: “PT1M33S”, “embedUrl”: “https://www.youtube.com/embed/s5Rj1EIU23c”, “interactionCount”: “202”>

Google Analytics: Identifying bot traffic

There are several ways to identify bots in Google Analytics. These depend on the type of bot visitors that you have.

1. Traffic spikes

It’s not always bots that cause sudden spikes in traffic. Some businesses may experience traffic surges due to viral posts on social media, influencer referrals or other factors. If none of these are true, it is usually a clear indication that your site has been visited by bot traffic. It is particularly true if your site also displays some of the metrics below.

2. Unusual measurements

This is another sign of bot traffic. But… this can also be a sign that your pages load slowly or provide a bad user experience. So before you shout “bot!” take a closer look at the basics.

3. Strange Behaviors

The most obvious indication that your website is being hacked by bots are the spam comments, declined card transactions or leads generated from nonsensical email addresses. These non-human behaviors are a sign that bots may be messing up your website.

4. Location Not Set

You can usually tell the OS and location of your visitors by looking at their site. Bot visitors do not always display their location, but it does appear in your Analytics dashboard. You can check the geo-locations if you have noticed high traffic.

Google Analytics User Guide: Learn more about Google Analytics

Do I have to block or exclude Analytics Bot data?

Many of the Analytics reports you will see include crawls by bots, such as AhrefsBot, SEMrushbot, or other research tools, or indexing data for search engines like DuckDuckGo or Bing.

These are definitely good bots, and you would be better off blocking them rather than excluding them from your analytics.

It’s not uncommon to add known bad bot traffic into your exclusion list when it comes to blocking badbot activity.

How do you create blocklists and exclusions?

How to exclude bots in Google Analytics?

You can exclude bot activity in your Analytics dashboard using four different methods.

1. Use the Google Analytics standard bot filtering feature.

Click on Admin > View section > View settings – Check the box that says Bot Filtering “Exclude all hits by known bots and Spiders”.

It will remove (obviously), all bot activity. This means that the data has been removed but the bots have not been blocked.

2. Create a custom view and exclude specific bots. Go to:

Click the blue “Create View” button under Admin > View. You will be asked to name your new view. Check that the Bot Filtering option is not selected.

Then you can add your own filters. Filters is the place to go.

Then you can choose between predefined or custom filters.

You can add your IP addresses, hostnames and ISP details to each filter. Verify the filter’s effect on your data before applying it.

3. Use the referral exclusion lists.

Tracking Information > Referral Exclusion list

You can remove domains that appear to be providing ghost spam or SEO spam from your analytics data.

Enter the domains that you wish to exclude, and then save the filter.

4. Remove bot activity from existing analytics data.

You can add a filter to your website’s history if you want to view the traffic without bots.

Click on the Analytics tab.

Audience > Overview Click on “Add Segment” > “New Segment”

Choose the drop-down menu ‘Include/Exclude” and name your segment. You will want to select ‘Exclude.

Enter the domains that you have identified as bot traffic.

By clicking Save, your filter will be saved and any bot data that is already in Analytics will not be included.

What are these solutions?

Remove bot traffic from Google Analytics to gain a better understanding of the traffic on your website.

It is possible to remove the data, but it will not stop bots from visiting your website or clicking on your ads.

Click fraud prevention is the only way to remove bad bot activity on your website or in your ad campaign.

ClickCease blocks bad bot traffic using the most advanced technologies in real-time. Click fraud traffic such as click farms and other non-human traffic will not be able to click on your PPC advertisements.

Click fraud is a type of scam.

What about DDoS, spam bot traffic, organic bots or direct bots?

Our new Bot Zapping Solution offers protection for WordPress websites, allowing the good bots to enter and keeping out the bad bots.

ClickCease filters out malicious traffic and spam by identifying bots in real-time. It also allows real customers to access the site.

ClickCease offers a free PPC ad traffic audit.

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