Bot Traffic In Ga4
Management Summary
The following article explains what bot traffic is and how to identify it.
What is Bot Traffic?
Bot traffic is the traffic on the Internet that is generated by automated software programs or “bots” rather than by human users. Bots are scripts or algorithms designed to perform specific tasks, such as indexing websites for search engines, collecting information, automating interactions on websites, or carrying out spam actions.
- Search engine crawler: Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo use bots to scan the Internet for new content and index websites.
- Social media bots: Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram use bots to detect and remove spam and unwanted content. These bots can also be used to monitor user activity and identify trends.
- Content scraping bots: Some bots are used to copy content from websites for reuse elsewhere. This can lead to copyright infringement.
- Malicious bots: There are also malicious bots that are used for malicious activities. Examples include bots that perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, leave spam comments on blogs, steal personal information, or carry out automated attacks on websites.
- Data analysis bots: Companies use bots to collect and analyze data from the web. This can be used to gather competitive intelligence, compare prices or conduct market research.
What problems can bot traffic cause?
As mentioned above, bot traffic can have positive but also very often negative effects and cause major problems:
- Biased analyses: When bots access websites, they can provide incorrect data to web analytics and distort reports.
- Distorted clicks and advertising revenue: Bots can click on ads and act as if they were real users, which can lead to distorted click-through rates and reduced advertising revenue.
- Server overload: When bots access a website in large numbers, it can cause server overload.
- Security risks: Malicious bots can be used to exploit website vulnerabilities to steal data, spread viruses, or carry out other malicious activities.
- Increased costsdue to higher bandwidth and server resources.
- Spam and unwanted content: Some bots are used to leave spam messages, comments or links on websites.
- Data loss and corruption: Bots can automatically collect, copy and distort data from websites. This can lead to a loss of valuable information and jeopardize the integrity of the data.
Does GA4 detect and block bot traffic?
Yes and no!GA4 blocks known bot traffic using two different sources. On the one hand through research data from Google and on the other hand through the “International Spiders and Bots List”, which is determined by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).
However, there are still bots that are not recognized or filtered by Google. These are mainly bots from SEO tools or consent management platforms (CMP). But new and unknown or well-camouflaged bots that simulate human behavior very well are also not recognized. There are also bots that change their IP addresses, making identification for GA4 much more difficult.
How do I identify bot traffic in Google Analytics?
Since we don’t want any bot or spam traffic in our GA4 analyses, we have to try to identify the wrong traffic and then, in the best case, filter it or exclude it beforehand.
There are several approaches and methods for detecting such traffic, but all methods have one thing in common -> Abnormalities and suspicious traffic are always a strong indication of bots.
What options do I have to identify unwanted traffic?
- Screen resolution: Bots often use a screen resolution of 800×600 or 400×400 that is no longer used. If you find such traffic in the reports, it should be analyzed more closely.
- Operating system: Another anomaly can be found with the “operating system” dimension. In the screenshot you can see a peak with the value “Linux”. Usually not very many visitors use Linux, so this traffic should be analyzed in more detail and filtered if necessary.
- Browser version: Another sign can be outdated browser versions. Users’ browsers are usually constantly updated.
- Short or no session duration: Bots usually have a very short session duration or even a session duration of 0 seconds.
- Unusual sources: Another clue could be various sources that are unknown and/or unusual. The following screenshot is an example of both “short session duration” and “unusual sources”.
- Little or no interactions: Access with little or no interaction is also an indication of bots, as they are often unable to interact with the site.
- Extremely many events with very few users: Conversely, it is also possible that you see an unusually large number of events with very few users.
- Unusual country access: There are often visits from countries that are very unusual for the websites. Example: For a German-language blog, access from non-German-speaking countries is unusual.
- Traffic spikes on same days: If you see a traffic peak on the same days in the reports over a longer period of time, it’s coming from crawlers. Typically, CMPs or SEO tools always crawl the website on the same days and at the same time to fulfill the tools’ services.
- Pageviews with empty page titles
In summary one can say:
Whenever the numbers are very noticeable or there are extreme peaks, it is probably spam traffic and should be analyzed more closely. The quality of data and analytics reports benefits from careful filtering or exclusion of data from bot traffic.
We will soon explain how to avoid spam traffic in the second part.
