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Semalt – How To Get Rid Of Bot Traffic In Your Google Analytics

It would not be wrong to say that data is the cornerstone of all of the online business and marketing decisions. It is important for us to develop an understanding of our data and ensure that it is up to the current marketing trends. We should also evaluate the behavior of users on our website and know everything about the industry shifts. This is only possible when we exclude bot traffic from the Google Analytics and focus on getting the desired results.

Alexander Peresunko, the Customer Success Manager of Semalt, unveils some marketing secrets in this regard.

In order to collect data, you should use different analytical and monitoring options. However, Google Analytics is the most authentic and widely used tool. This lets you find the legitimacy of your data and shows you correct results. More than two billion websites use Google Analytics to evaluate and analyze the quality of their visits. Bot traffic is something that can harm your website and can make you feel suffer on the internet. It eventually leads to wrong conclusions, evaluations, and assumptions, thus affecting your site's performance and credibility.

About Bots

We should not forget that for all human hits there are bot hits to the server. So, it is safe to say that bots have become an essential and must component of any website. There are two types of bots: good bots and bad bots.

Good bots are the ones that behave nicely and are favorable for your website, while bad bots are those that are created by the hackers and attackers and they intend to crawl and index your website illegally. A report reveals that more than twenty percent of all traffic sent by good bots is overtaken by the malicious and dangerous bots. So we can say that bots cannot be site-friendly at any cost and should be gotten rid of as early as possible.

Two other types of bots are ghost bots and zombie bots. Ghosts bots are the ones that do not visit your website but show off the similar results, while the zombie bots are the ones that fully render your website. They produce reports in Google Analytics and pretend to be genuine. They insert their specific codes on your analytics data and try to harm it in one way or the other.

How to Exclude Bot Traffic

Google recently announced that there are several solutions for filtering good bots, bad bots as well as referral spam in Google Analytics. For this purpose, you should set up unfiltered views and get to know the sources of your traffic. You should know the tricks of distinguishing between the good bots and bad bots. You can adapt a number of marketing strategies to maximize your chances of getting unique views on your website. It is also an advantage if you make different filters for both internal and external traffic sources. You can block several IPs that look suspicious and have nothing to do with authenticity. In case of zombie bots, you should filter them by detecting their location and footprints. For this, you would have to know everything about their source and proceed with the footprint creation step.