Built-in Audience that Excludes Bots

[#1]

Target should have a built-in Audience that automatically excludes the IAB Bots. This Audience should also provide the ability to add specific user-agents.

Similar functionality can be found within Adobe Analytics (see screen shot below). The IAB Bot Filtering can be checked to filter out known bots, and then the ability to add specific user-agents as well is provided.

Having Bots in the Tests negatively impacts visitor metrics, such as RPV.

[#2]

I completely agree.

[#3]

Thanks for the vote!

[#4]

This is a good request. As a current work around you can create a profile script to build this audience. Something like this probably gets you ~80% of the way there:

if (user.isFirstSession == true) {
	var br1 = user.browser.match(/bot\b|spider|crawl|wget|slurp|Mediapartners-Google|nutch|BingPreview|PhantomJS|PTST|yahoo ad mon|Google Web Preview|Google Page Speed|outbrain|Pingdom|yandex/i);
	if (br1 != null) {
		return "true";
	}
}

It checks to see if it is a first time visitor, if so it evaluates their user agent for the common bot useragents. If one of them is found it returns the string "true". You can then create an audience off of that profile script value.

[#5]

Hi ryanr8​

Thanks for saying this is a good request

We made an Audience to exclude based on values in the HTTP Header (see screen shot below).

Though, profile scripts are something I would like to get a better handle on (right now I feel like profile scripts man-handle me ). Would you mind explaining the pros/cons of using a regular audience vs using a profile script value to build the audience to exclude bots?

Thanks so much!!

Sarah

[#6]

That works too. One of the big advantages of the profile script in my opinion is that I can use regex. So my one "bot\b" condition will find any user agent with "bot" no need to explicitly look for bingbot, adsbot, googlebot, etc. And the regex doesn't include any false positive matches like "bottom", "bother" or whatever else might be in a useragent that isn't actually a bot.

[#7]

This is amazing.. I usually add segment filter in my reports to exclude bots traffic..

Target reporting will be more accurate besides saves a lot of time in creating and importing audience from analytics

[#8]

Thanks for the vote, YogitaBist​!

[#9]

This is exactly what I'm looking for as well - trying to avoid negative SEO hit from running a dual URL test (testing experiences are drastically different) by sending all bot traffic to the already live/indexed URL for the life of the test since any action taken will eventually overtake that URL.

[#10]

Hi Ryan_Roberts_

Can you share the condition you would have in profile script here?

-Dev

[#11]

If you are using A4T - should this automatically work?

IE - I have a Target activity and am running reports through Analytics.  If a bot enters the activity, their data would still be excluded from the A4T report because of the rules set within Analytics.

Is this a valid assumption?