What is bot traffic?

Bot traffic refers to non-human traffic generated by automated computer programs on websites or applications.

This type of traffic is not necessarily bad, but depends on the purpose of the bots. Some, such as search engine crawlers, are useful because they allow your website to be indexed, while others can be harmful.
An example of a negative bot is scrapers, which are programs designed to extract data from websites without the owner’s permission. These bots can distort traffic metrics by simulating more visitors than are actually there, or overload the server with excessive requests, slowing down the website.

So where do these bots come from? Sometimes they are caused by competitors trying to monitor prices and strategies through scraping tools. In other cases, it may be an attempt to overload an ecommerce store’s server and interfere with its proper functioning. In fact, this type of activity not only compromises a site’s competitiveness, but can also have a negative impact on the user experience, reducing the ability of web pages to respond promptly to requests from visitors interested in a particular brand or product.

This anomalous traffic can therefore be caused by:

• Search engines, to index content with a positive purpose
• Analytics tools, to monitor performance
• Fraudulent activity, such as click fraud and other malicious activities

Why is bot traffic tracked and visible in GA4?

Google Analytics 4 includes automatic filters to detect and exclude bot and scraper traffic. However, due to the changing nature of bots and advanced techniques for masking their behavior to resemble that of real users, some unwanted visits may still be recorded.

For this reason, it is important to carefully and consistently monitor the data collected, and to manually remove any remaining false traffic.

How to detect bot traffic

Although it is very advanced and has evolved over time, bot traffic has distinctive characteristics that allow it to be detected. Careful monitoring of the following dimensions and metrics can help identify this type of traffic:

• Direct traffic: bot traffic is often hidden in direct traffic. A sudden, unexplained spike in this type of traffic can indicate the presence of malicious bots.
• Screen resolution: real users typically browse on a computer, smartphone or tablet, using standard screen resolutions. Detecting unusual or even non-existent screen resolutions is another indicator of bot traffic.
• Country: monitoring traffic coming from unusual cities and regions or countries unrelated to your target market can be useful in spotting anomalies
• Engagement Time & Bounce Rate: these two parameters are crucial in assessing the performance of an website. A very low or zero engagement time combined with a very high bounce rate is often a symptom of abnormal traffic. In fact, bots do not interact with pages, but tend to enter and leave them quickly, negatively affecting the previous metrics.
• Transactions & Revenue: this type of traffic cannot perform transactions and generate revenue. If these metrics are zero and the above conditions co-exist, bot traffic is likely present.

In summary, if the size and metrics of anomalous visits reflect all of the above characteristics, it is very likely that the site is experiencing bot traffic.

How do I remove bot traffic in GA4? 

The best way to deal with anomalous traffic in Google Analytics 4 is to use advanced, custom filters. These filters can be configured to exclude specific traffic patterns that are known to be generated by bots or scrapers.

There are two main effective methods of doing this:

• FConditional filters: this method allows you to act directly at the report display level, creating exclusion filters directly within the reports in GA4. This is an excellent method as it allows anomalous traffic to be excluded retrospectively.
• IP filtering: this involves excluding IP addresses that are known to host bots. Suspicious addresses can be identified and added to an exclusion list within the Google Analytics 4 panel, ensuring that traffic from these IPs is excluded from reports.

For conditional filtering, you just have to analyze the data and identify critical situations that need to be excluded from reports.

The situation becomes more complex if you want to exclude specific IP addresses. In this case, IP addresses can only be detected if a server-side property linked to BigQuery has been configured to detect suspicious IP addresses. Thanks to our own server where we host Google Analytics data, we can easily implement this configuration and perform the specific checks.

How can GA4 effectively monitor bot traffic?

In order to take action against bot traffic from the outset, it is very useful to implement automatic alerts based on pre-defined conditions.

Alerts can be configured for specific situations, such as a sudden increase in direct traffic by abnormal screen resolutions or unusual traffic sources, or when a particular IP address accounts for a significant portion of traffic over a period of time.

These alerts can help you to quickly identify and resolve traffic anomalies by identifying any potential bot activity on the site.

Retrospectively managing bot traffic on GA4 is essential to remove false visits and ensure that the data collected accurately reflects the behavior of real users. With the right support and continuous monitoring, it is possible to protect your website from malicious traffic and maintain a high quality data analysis.