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How to Block Bots and Spiders from Google Analytics (in under 5 minutes!)

Name: How to Block Bots and Spiders from Google Analytics (in under 5 minutes!)
Uploaded: 2014-08-13T13:02:02+00:00
Duration: 1 min 57 s
Channel: ChatFBP
Description: Short YouTube tutorial (Food Blogger Pro) explaining how to exclude bot and spider traffic from Google Analytics. The presenter frames the problem using…

13 Aug 2014 · 2 min

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1:57

Short YouTube tutorial (Food Blogger Pro) explaining how to exclude bot and spider traffic from Google Analytics. The presenter frames the problem using a Food Blogger Pro member (Michelle) who saw a spike of 103 new sessions labeled as direct. The video then demonstrates the quick fix in Google Analytics: Admin → View Settings → enable "Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders" and save, so future reports ignore known crawlers. Also includes a brief channel plug (mentions 31 subscribers).

Questions this video answers

August 13, 2014.

31 people (subscribers).

103 new sessions.

Admin → View (third column) → View Settings → check "Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders" → Save.

Chapters

Hey there, fellow food bloggers. We would love it if you subscribe to the food blogger pro YouTube channel. You can just go to YouTube.com foodbloggerpro. We are at 31 people and we thank every single one of you for subscribing to the channel. Just wanted to do a real quick plug there, but let's go ahead and jump into the question now. Alright? This question comes from Food Blogger Pro member Michelle. And Michelle was looking at her analytics and she was really smart. She noticed a peak here and you can see that right here. But when she did a little bit more research, she found out that all of the traffic in that peak was coming from a direct source. So she said, I had 103 new sessions and they all came from a direct source, meaning they just typed the URL into the browser. Well, we went back and forth and we're kind of trying to figure out how do you block a bot? But at the time it wasn't possible. But recently Google's made an update where you can now block any type of crawler or bottom. And we're not going to explain exactly what that is. You can do some Google searching on that if you want to find out. We're just going to look at how to block that. And I'm in Google Analytics. It's really simple. All you need to do is click on admin and then there's these three columns here. We're going to look for the last one and we're going to click on View Settings and that's going to open up the settings for our Google Analytics account for this website. And all we need to do is find this option right down here called bot feature filtering. And we want to say exclude all hits from known bots and spiders. And that's something that's important to do because we don't want that information included in our analytics because it's not people, it's actually robots or bots and spiders. So all you have to do is click save, which I just did, and then we can go back to reporting. We are back to our main page here in Google Analytics and from now on our site will not report back on any bots or spiders that hit our site. So our analytics will be even more accurate.