Question

I was just curious to know if the data presented in the google analytics report includes bots/spiders/crawlers. One of the websites that we are building is still stealth(zero marketing, though the site went live about 20 odd days ago). My boss was happy and proud that we are having visitors from all over the world already. But I am a little skeptical 🙂

Will be great if someone can clarify this for me!

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,

—
Sniper

Answer 1

As explained above, Google Analytics uses a Javascript based mechanism, and since most crawlers won’t execute JavaScript, you shouldn’t see crawlers into your stats, but true visitors.

In some situations however you could get some “noise” into your stats:

1. someone has put, by mistake ?, your UA number into its website pages, and you get hits from another web site into yours
2. some services that you subscribed to monitor the availability of your site from all over the world (like IP Label) run embedded browsers that execute JS and then will showup into your stats
3. last, you run the mobile tracking code of GA on your site, which is server side and no more JS based, then you can get crawlers into your stats while GA should remove most of them.

To assess if case 1 applies, go into Visitors / Network properties / Hostnames and check if only your hostname is diplayed. In case of other domain names showing up, you can build an advanced filter to include only your hostname

For case 2, look at visits per service providers from day to day to highlight service providers having a stable number of visits per day over time. You may also look at pages with a high share of direct access + bounce + similar volume of pageviews per day over time : this is typical of a monitoring system looking always at the same page.

For case 3, look at web browsers identified by GA in Visitors / Browsers