What happened last year:

Last year in July (the end of it), it was announced by Google Analytics that a new feature has got added automatically which doesn’t include spiders and bots from one’s data. It was all in the view of the admin area’s level for which one has the option to have a box labeled checked. You only need to have traffic excluded from spiders and bots which are known. There are a number of posts in regards to this and it can be said that most of them mirror the announcement and don’t really talk regarding why one needs to check a box. It can be a lot more interesting as a question which will be why won’t you want that. Yet for a lot of people you will need to have the box checked ultimately. You need to know why it is so and also have it tested prior to anything.

What about spiders and bots? What are they exactly?

Before you start with anything, you need to know what is a spider or a bot. Well, these are basically programs which are computer automated and aren’t run by people which hit websites. They hit websites for a lot of reasons. There are times when it is a search engine that looks to list the content of yours to their site. It can also be a program which looks and sees if the blog has new posts so that they can have someone know of that in the news reader. It can also be some service which can be hired by you to ensure that the server is up and it has normal loading speed and more features.

There are a lot of bots which are the basic ones which never run the code on sites like Google Analytics and JavaScript and hence you won’t be finding them in the reports for your traffic. But of course you will be seeing them in the server logs to which you will have access. There are a number of web hosts who indeed charge with the hit which is on the server and it is also based on the server logs they have. You will find there to be sites which are known to have a lot of hits such as these and for this there is only the evidence of the entire thing on server log level. A lot of you must have automated these services in having the servers pinged and also looking for posts which are new and also that the passing seconds are costing money for sure. Well, don’t worry for we are not really minding it. It won’t be screwing up the analytics data.

There are problems too:

There are problems which start when one can learn that there are some of the programs for computer which have really been running in an automatic manner and also they can be running the code for Google Analytics as well and it will all show up as some hit in the Google Analytics. There are times of course, when the site can get touched barely by all these and then you won’t be giving them any second thought since they won’t be going to your site for visiting it enough in order to have it skewed with the insights of yours. And then there are times when you can get wild and then the insanity is spiking the data and you need to deal with that.