How to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders by using the Bot Filtering feature in Google Analytics

 As we all may know, Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Most website owners now use Google analytics to track website traffic. But as you might have observed, over time, there might be a lot of junk traffic hits on your website from bots, spiders and referrals sites. They never visit the website but send junk traffic to your Google Analytics so your web traffic might show inflated hits but in reality, human visits are much less. So it is hard to identify the real traffic that comes to the web pages. Referral sites like “floating-share-buttons.com” or “webmonetizer.net” or “Semalt”are pretty common ones.

How to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders by using the Bot Filtering feature in Google Analytics. 


As users of Google products, we should, well be using their product without much hassles dealing with junk data. But then Google is not to be blamed for the junk data as they did not create them. But then, ideally, Google Analytics should not allow spam hits to tamper real data. Unfortunately, Google Analytics is not able to block these junk referrals in tampering our data in Google Analytics. And manually tracking the junk sources and creating filters is a tiring task. While there are several ways to filter out these junk traffic, and by doing a simple Google Search how to do it, you might have found a lot of different techniques explained by others, there is also an option called "Bot Filtering" provided by Google within Google Analytics to "Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders" and filter such traffic from spammy sources.

Anyways, Google Analytics introduced "Bot Filtering"option in View settings which was announced on their Google+ page in July 2014. Not sure how good this is going to be, but at least if it blocks known bots and spiders, and if Google keeps that updating then that is going to be a huge time saver.


To apply the 'Bot Filtering" provided in Google Analytics, do the following:

• Login to Google Analytics
• Click on "admin"
• Select "account", select "property" and select "view = all website data"
• Click on "View Settings"
• Scroll down and check "Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders" at Bot Filtering.
• Click "Save"

I am gonna be observing if the "bot filtering" option in Google Analytics really does work and helps in filtering our some junk data in Google Analytics.