Bot & Invalid Traffic

Bot & Invalid Traffic shows the visits that the other Web Analytics reports leave out because they came from bots, and how many visits look suspect.

How It’s Calculated

The table has one row for each kind of session that occurred in the date range. The columns are:

• Classification: Known bot, Suspected bot / invalid, Unidentified client or Likely valid.
• Sessions: the number of sessions of that kind.
• Share: the part of all sessions.
• Conversions: the number of those sessions that ended in a purchase.

das Pixel puts each session in the first of these that fits:

1. Known bot: the text the browser sends to identify itself matches a known crawler or scripted tool. This includes search and SEO crawlers, link preview tools, headless browsers and automation tools, uptime and speed monitors, and scripted HTTP libraries. These are the sessions every other Web Analytics report leaves out.
2. Suspected bot / invalid: no browser and no operating system were recorded, the session had 1 event at most, and it didn’t buy.
3. Unidentified client: no browser was recorded, but the session doesn’t meet the rule above. It may have an operating system, several events or a purchase.
4. Likely valid: everything else.

The first rule is exact. The other 2 are a rough guess from the few signals das Pixel records. This isn’t a fraud or security check, so treat them as a guide.

A session counts as a known bot when any of its events matches. Visits from a bot are stored, and the other reports remove them when they run. A change to the list of known bots therefore applies to your past data too.

Summary Cards

The cards above the table are Sessions and Conversions. They add up every row, so they include the bot sessions the other reports leave out.

What Counts

• Visitors who declined analytics cookies, or who opted out of the sale or sharing of their data while Require Sale-of-Data Consent is on, aren’t recorded.
• Only events inside the date range count, in your store’s time zone.
• Turn on Live to refresh the report every 30 seconds. Without it, a figure can be up to 10 minutes old.

This report has no Compare, Segment, Sales Channel or Filters control. Pinned to a dashboard, it can show a bar chart of the sessions for each classification.

What Good Looks Like

There’s no target. Most of your sessions should be Likely valid. A large Known bot share isn’t harmful to your numbers, because those visits are already removed from the other reports.

It shows how much traffic was filtered.

A rise in Suspected bot / invalid can mean scripted traffic that the known list doesn’t catch.

What to Do About It

• A large Known bot share: no action is needed. The other reports leave these visits out.
• A growing Suspected bot / invalid share: check your ad traffic in Sessions by Source & Channel for a channel with many sessions and a very high bounce rate.

Get AI Insight at the top of the report asks Copilot for a short read of it.

Where to Find It

• Bot & Invalid Traffic: open Reports and look under Web Analytics.