Have you ever noticed strange traffic sources in your analytics reports that don’t seem to belong to human visitors? Those are probably bots, and they can hurt your web performance by distorting your data and creating fake events. In this article, we’ll teach you how to identify automated traffic sources in Google Analytics and take action accordingly.

While most bots have a positive impact on the Internet, there are also bad ones that can damage your website or steal sensitive information. Malicious bots are often sophisticated and can mimic human behavior to hide their identity, spread malware, or conduct click fraud.

Uncover Sources of Automated Web Traffic

Some bots are designed to target a specific type of web traffic, such as scalper bots that outpace human customers in the purchase of fast-moving goods or limited edition items, and OTP bots that extract one-time passwords without a user’s knowledge. Other bots are designed to attack a site’s infrastructure, such as DDoS attacks that disrupt online commerce or service availability.

While there are a few ways to reduce the amount of bot traffic on your site, most are not foolproof and can be easily bypassed by advanced bots. The best approach is to regularly check your server logs for suspicious IP addresses and requests that suggest non-human behavior. There are multiple commercial and open-source solutions that can help you analyze your logs, including Fluentd, Logstash, Sumologic, New Relic and others.

You should also look for the “User-Agent” string in your HTTP headers to detect suspicious browser versions and patterns that can indicate bot activity. Combined with the source country, session duration and other metrics in your channels report, you can quickly assess whether or not a particular source is likely a bot.