It’s a great feeling to log into your website statistical program and see tons of traffic. But it is extremely disappointing to realize that a large part of that web traffic is coming, not from customers or potential customers, but rather from search engine bots and spiders. Therefore, to get a more accurate picture of your website traffic, you should remove bots and spiders from from your web stats reports.
It used to be a pretty labor intensive and time consuming process to exclude bots and spiders from appearing in (and skewing!) your web statistics within Google Analytics. However, Google recently implemented a simple, but important, update to it’s Analytics program to allow users to exclude bots and spiders from stats with a single click. Removing bots and spiders from your Google Analytics stats is now as simple as checking a box!
5 Simple Steps to exclude bots and spiders from your Google Analytics results:
- Log into your Google Analytics account
- Click the ‘Admin’ link in the main menu (along the top of the screen)
- Then, click ‘View Settings’ in the VIEW column (at the right of the screen).
- Scroll down on the ‘Report View Settings’ page until you see a check box entitled ‘Bot Filtering’ and check the box to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders.
- Click Save.
Once set, all future reporting should exclude visits from search engine bots and spiders from your stats (this change won’t affect any of your past statistics or reports, but rather will only affect reports from the date you make the change onward).
