Snapchat preload to exclude from Analytics

[#1]

Hi all,

We noticed that we have pics in Snapshat visit-trafic : numbers are illogically high for our campaigns.

With our media agence, we worked out that this was due to a “SnapChat-preload” function, a Snap-bot “preparing” all links in our ads and preloading the links. Adobe identifies all these preloads as visits although no user actually visited the link.

A filter (segment to exclude) was created to exclude them :

• hit coming from Last touch channel detail contains “social_SN” identifying Snapchat (parameter in the URL used)

AND :

Pageview for hit does not exist

OR

Display width x height in real pixels = undefinedxundefined

OR

Display width x height does not exist

Do you have any suggestion on how to avoid the load of the preload in Adobe Analytics ?

Are these “undefined” visits bot-visits that we have to exclude?

By doing this, I’m afraid to also reject other info that are correct. Is there any specific user agent dedicated for snapchat ? I suppose this problem concerned also others users of Analytics. How do they deal with this ? What are the recommendation from Adobe ?

Thanks

Robin

[#2]

The reason I'd avoid using a bot rule is that the traffic isn't actually from a bot. Instead, it's from someone looking at an ad on Snapchat and the destination URL for that ad loading in the background.

You may wind up advertising on Snapchat in the future without the pre-load function activated, and would likely want to know if people are actually clicking on the ad and landing on your site. If you label the traffic as a bot you wouldn't see those visits. The reason I excluded the Snapchat user-agent string is because the organization has no plans on advertising on Snapchat again, so I don't have to worry about excluding traffic.

[#3]

Thanks a lot for your answer.

I was considering to do this and consider all user agent with Snapchat as bot to not collect them in Analytics :

Create a custom bot rule

But I'm afraid to also exclude the correct ones, no ?

What do you think ?

[#4]

I had to deal with an ad agency activating the Snapchat preload without informing anyone of the decision, and it was a giant pain. I wound up creating a virtual report suite and applied a segment excluding all Snapchat traffic because most of it was not "real" (i.e. the ad preloaded but the "visit" didn't include more than one page). I used the User-Agent string in the exclusion segment. The string will include "snapchat" (or at least did at the time).