In this post we’re going to discuss bots from Yahoo! and Microsoft, why it’s important and how to identify the traffic and see if it’s affecting your site.
Why is this important? Well as you’ll see, all of this bot traffic comes into your site as Direct traffic, has exactly one pageview and then does nothing, and that is the problem. We have to remember that a visit as just described equals a bounce — which is a bad thing. So as you look at your reports over time, you may wonder why your goal conversion rates or Ecommerce conversion rates from Direct traffic have plummeted while your bounce rates have increased. Part of the answer could very well be bots. And if you don’t account for this traffic in your quest for the analytics intelligence that will turn your site from a business cost to a profit center, you may never get there!
So how do you know if this traffic is affecting your site? Well by looking from 30,000 feet, you may never know — you have to dig deep. So if you haven’t already been digging for answers about your Direct traffic performance, let me walk you through how to identify these bots.
First of all we know that the focus area is Direct traffic that bounces; so the first step is to create an advanced segment to “filter” all of our reports for these visits in Google Analytics Reports.
If you’d like to “play along” as you read this post here is a link to the segment:
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?uid=BH3Nk-LCSpmv7UQyPXgGDA
This is a view of the service providers in the Network sub-section of the Technology Report that have been the source of our Direct, bouncing traffic.
next : go to original page here : http://www.morevisibility.com/blogs/analytics/bot-traffic-in-google-analytics.html
