3/28/2023 0 Comments Google analytics trafficbot![]() ![]() Google Analytics drastically changed the way analytics is done. Determining the real number of human visitors was even tougher. It had its pros, but it was tough to differentiate between what the system identified as hits and actual page views. ![]() Here are just some of the bad bot issues I encountered recently: fake Google AdSense traffic, botched conversion metrics, site usage made irrelevant, and a ruined A/B test.īack in the late 90s I used Webalizer, an open source solution that was the de-facto standard for web analytics. Failure to identify bad bot traffic can be a mistake that can cost you money. Whether you are running a news site backed by advertising or an e-commerce web application, visitor usage data is precious as it’s often used as a basis for important business decisions. ![]() So-called “bad bots” can be used against websites in different ways: scanning for vulnerabilities and identifying potential exploitable threats, price scraping, crawling and copying of the content, targeted DDoS attacks, and so on.Īside from these security issues, there are also performance issues – it is not uncommon for bots to deplete server resources and consequently lessen the quality of the visitor experience. To detect bots, Distil Bot Discovery for Google Analytics uses Are You a Human technology (acquired by the company in 2017), which checks all visitors against hundreds of different characteristics, with a special focus on their behavior. Things change by the minute, so this ended up being just a fun exercise that couldn’t produce any usable results. Search engine crawlers are easy to identify, but picking out scrapers, infected PCs, mass scanners, fake traffic generators, and so on is an arduous process.Ī year ago I had a pet project where I tried to manually build Splunk functionality for identifying bots by analyzing raw httpd logs. How to differentiate a human website visitor from a bot? The service is provided by Distil Networks, a company specializing in bot detection and mitigation services. If you’re struggling with bot traffic or you’d like help setting up this segment or filter, get in touch – we’re always happy to help.Distil Bot Discovery for Google Analytics is a free offering that will give website owners the ability to understand the impact of bots on their business. It’s also important to ensure you’ve ticked the box in your view settings to exclude all known bots as this will protect you against the most common attacks. Of course, there may be other similar attacks in future so you may need to update the filter at a later date. With this in place, you won’t see any more hits from /trafficbot.life or /bot-traffic.icu. If you haven’t yet experienced this type of bot traffic but you’d like to protect yourself against it – set up a filter for your Google Analytics view based on the Request URI – to remove any hits that include /trafficbot.life or /bot-traffic.icu. How do I prevent /trafficbot.life from appearing in Google Analytics? All is not lost, however, because if you want to analyse data from a time period which includes this spam traffic, you can create a Segment to exclude it: Once data has been processed, it cannot be edited or deleted. If it’s already hit your Google Analytics account, it’s too late. How do I remove /trafficbot.life from Google Analytics? There is absolutely no value to doing this whatsoever – the reality is that this spam bot traffic is just a pain in the ass that’s messed with your data. Why? I guess they want you to visit their website and buy some more fake traffic from them. Long story short, it’s a bot which automates a process to ping hits to your Google Analytics account populating your reports with a URL. What is /trafficbot.life and how did it get in my Google Analytics reports? There’s a good chance you experienced it too, if you’re reading this. They weren’t alone – lots of people reported similar issues on the Google Analytics support forums. One of the most common issues we saw came from /trafficbot.life and /bot-traffic.icu appearing in the Site Content reports of our clients. There was a significant surge in bot traffic in Google Analytics from 31st January to 2nd February 2021. ![]()
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