Filter out Spider and Bot traffic from SiteCatalyst

I think this should include a warning system that identifies suspicious IP Addresses (i.e. sening an enormous amount of traffic per day) and allow you to block that IP address from now on...

This is a great idea. We currently do this via a VISTA rule but this is at an additional cost, I think this should come as standard within Site Catalyst.

What, it's not already filtered out? Hmmm...

Yeah I was lead to believe spiders and bots are already automatically filtered out ... ?

We do see bots in our reporting that apparently execute the Java Script. Not many, but they are there. At this time, they do not seriously affect our reporting.

Most bots/spiders do not execute Javascript.  However, I was also under the notion that Omniture automatically handled the remaining ones that do.

Have had this discussion/debate with omniture.  They SHOULD be filtering out sipders without cost.  One of the most important aspects of analytics is it's reliability, if bots/spiders are executing javascript or making image request (some implementation include this to capture non javascript users) then this places a big question mark over the numbers and requires further auditing.  We have in the past spotted/identified bots/spiders executing javascript and/or making image requests, doesn't really matter what the % of bots/spiders that do this might be as one hit by any of these would skew up the data.

I have to agree that this is a big issue and an easy one to solve for Omniture.  THey should simply maintain a list of known bot IPs and have a setting in the admin consule where we can click to have this IP filter applied to our data like a standard Vista Rule.  And just like Vista rules; they would still get the server calls since it did hit their servers but we won't see the numbers in our data sets.  That's a win / win for both parties.  Clean data for us continued revenue for Omniture.

Bot/ spider filtering is critical for data accuracy, but we found out the hard way that this is not being done by Omniture.  The cost to implement this via a Vista rule was also a surprise.  

We requested that Omniture recreate the filter that was previously available through HBX, to no avail.  In the end, we had to supply the bot/ spider list ourselves.  They made a short list available, but it was incomplete and was not being updated.

Omniture should be using the IAB spider/ bot list (with regular updates) and implement this for all clients automatically. 

Omniture can do this using a Vista rule, it is just a mnual task that needs to be done monthly. They can either use the IAB list of bots/spiders or in the UK ABCe publish a list of these. We are currently testing this facility which I believe should be offered to all customers as a matter of course - out of the box with no additional charge. Without credible data any insight is meaningless.