Spotting bots in Google Analytics

Its awesome when you see a spike in traffic for your website right? Sure?

Here is what I saw when I logged in the dashboard of my personal website (something I have not updated for a while)

All that glitters is not Gold

Now, if you did not know better, traffic spurts in Google Analytics are almost always going to be bots unless you just became a rock star.

In my case, across all the accounts I have managed or helped, bots almost always mess your traffic data. A simple check is to validate the Source/Medium field for your traffic. Here is the data for the spurt above:

Spike caused due to bots

Don’t trust what you see

92% of my traffic was bots. Historically, I used to create a segment where in I would exclude all bot traffic with the referral data, but it was a tedious task. More importantly, you can’t trust “google/organic” too. You will see bot traffic coming from “google/organic” but with spammy keywords, here is an example

Spam traffic from google / organic as Source

The silver(ish) bullet — Hostname

So, how do you remove bots from your reports in a single shot? The answer lies in “hostname”. If you go look at your audience by hostname you may notice that at lot of traffic does not come from my own website. I have added the referrer to showcase that most of the spam traffic is indeed coming from other hostnames.

Spam traffic from “dirty” hostnames

The reason I called it a silver-ish bullet was it is not going to be accurate 100% of the time.

TL;DR

Don’t be too happy when you see a spike in traffic without making sure that its not bots messing up your data.

Here is my data for a longer period with “Dirty host names” and “non dirty host names”

Note: the Pages/session, Session duration, Bounce rate & Percentage of New Sessions are all bad for dirty hostnames.

Did you find this post useful? Please do hit the 💟 button.
Want more? Follow us :)

Want to start seeing such insights for your app? Give PureMetrics a try