Whatstuffwherebot user agent messing up Google Analytics
-
Starting yesterday, Aug 26, 2020, I noticed a new bot crawling our site with user agent whatstuffwherebot.
Google Analytics is counting these hits as human traffic, completely throwing off my numbers - yesterday, Analytics reported nearly triple my typical number of visitors.
As of now, Search Console only shows data through Aug 25 so I don't know if Search Console is also affected.
Is anybody else seeing something similar?
Does anybody know what the whatstuffwherebot bot is? I don't get any results when I search on Google or Bing.
For what it's worth, the traffic is coming from Columbus, OH, running over Amazon AWS via 278 different IP addresses so far. Also, WordFence (my WordPress security plugin) correctly identifies these hits as bot traffic.
-
Hi Martijn,
Thanks for the reply.
Yes, I've enabled bot filtering on all views except my unfiltered view. My site gets so much bot traffic that the data would be unusable without it.
As for filtering the traffic, I'm not aware of any way to retroactively filter out User-Agent unless I use GTM to create a custom dimension as described here: https://www.addsearch.com/docs/analytics/addsearch-bot-google-analytics/
Perhaps this is something I should do in case something like this ever happens again in the future.
I'm still hoping for other suggestions - particularly ways to ask the Google Analytics team to include "whatstuffwherebot" as part of their bot filtering.Best,
Akira -
Hi Akira,
Have you enabled bot filtering as a setting in Google Analytics on a view level? If not, you could always add a filter on the property or account level to filter out the traffic if it has very common patterns as you're describing. Usually, I would just stay away, from filtering out this type of traffic though if you have large amounts of traffic as otherwise you might be doing more harm to your data long-term than helping it.
Martijn.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moving our Google Analytics Account to a New Account
My company is building a new website with a new web development company. Our old website development company hosted our Google Analytics account on their account (this was done 13+ years ago, probably a good idea then, but we definitely would've done it differently knowing what we know now). I've been researching how we could move our GA property to a new account owned by us, but according to this article: "There are some circumstances in which you cannot move a property:
Reporting & Analytics | | GreatLegalMarketing
-> The source account and the destination account are not in the same Google Marketing Platform organization. Contact an organization admin to make sure both accounts belong to the same organization." In our case, the source account and the destination account do not belong to the same organization. I may just have to accept that we are losing 13+ years of historical data about our website, and if that's the case, oh well. But, if anyone has an idea how we can export/import our GA data to our new analytics account, I would greatly appreciate it.0 -
% Change - Google analytics - how to calculate?
Hi All,
Reporting & Analytics | | JohnPalmer
I have two dates with two different numbers I want to calculate the "% Change" like google analytics, The numbers of June 2015 - 127,931 sessions
The numbers of June 2014 - 90914 sessions please tell me what is the %Change. Best. J0 -
Www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js what is this link doing on my website?
Hello Expert, I am using google tag manager and google analytic is already configured in that now i just want to confirm when i do inspect element of my home page in that i can see this link - http://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js where as if i do view source of my page then it is not visible. so what is this link - www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js and what role it play? Do we really need this link to be present on website? Regards, Raghuvinder
Reporting & Analytics | | raghuvinder0 -
URL open with double domain names when click on visit URL link in Google Analytics
I have configured Advance Filter to track the sub-domains traffic as follow : Filter
Reporting & Analytics | | gamesecure
Type: Custom filter > Advanced Field A: Hostname Extract A: (.*) Field B: Request URI Extract B: (.*) Output To: Request URI Constructor: $A1$B1 After that, I am able to see sub-domains record and View Full Page URL In Reports. But when I check reports in All page (e.g. Behavior >> All Pages) or selecting Landing Page as a Primary Dimension. Further I click on Icon given next to displayed Full URL to visit to same domain page, in browser the page
opened but the double domain name comes so page not open successfully. For example : In landing page list following URL given : www.sitegeek.com/compareHosting/arvixe_vs_hostgator If I click on icon given next the displayed URL, in browser following URL will
open https://sitegeek.comwww.sitegeek.com/compareHosting/arvixe_vs_hostgator Is this First Domain with HTTPs, coming from Google Analytic 'View' where this is taken ? How Can I remove double domains? Thanks, Rajiv0 -
Does Google Analytics track conversions in real time?
Looking at the section: Conversions > Goals > Overview - does Google Analytics provide real time / same day metrics for this conversion data or does it take 24 hrs?
Reporting & Analytics | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Viewing 'overall' data for multiple Google Analytics accounts
Is there any way you can view data from all of your Google Analytics accounts? For example, if I wanted to view know how much mobile traffic all my sites had, could I do this? Rather than just looking at each site individually. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | intSchools0 -
Do Google Analytics filters affect link building?
We recently made a few link wheels for specific product pages. We've been having great results with all of the wheels except for one. The one we are having issues with is the only link that we were using a Google Analytics filter on; it looks like this http://domain.com/page.htm?zSource=Specific Keyword%tracking My question is does Google ignore links that are obviously utilizing their analyitcs custom filters? We're doing some more testing to try to find out if it truly is the link or if the wheel is a bad one. There are so many things that could go wrong but with so many of our link wheels working well, I wonder if the filters are what is causing such results.
Reporting & Analytics | | MichealGooden0