Built-in Audience that Excludes Bots | Community
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SarahEOwen
SarahEOwen
Level 9
September 18, 2017
Accepted

Built-in Audience that Excludes Bots

  • September 18, 2017
  • 10 replies
  • 12238 views

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.

    10 replies

    P
    PeterO3
    Level 2
    September 22, 2017

    I completely agree.

    SarahEOwen
    SarahEOwenAuthor
    Level 9
    September 22, 2017

    Thanks for the vote!

    R
    Adobe Employee
    ryanr7Adobe Employee
    Adobe Employee
    September 28, 2017

    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.

    SarahEOwen
    SarahEOwenAuthor
    Level 9
    September 28, 2017

    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

    R
    Adobe Employee
    ryanr7Adobe Employee
    Adobe Employee
    September 29, 2017

    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.

    YogitaBist
    YogitaBist
    Level 3
    November 13, 2017

    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

    SarahEOwen
    SarahEOwenAuthor
    Level 9
    November 13, 2017

    Thanks for the vote, YogitaBist​!

    J
    jacote
    October 4, 2018

    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.

    D
    devendras954761
    July 22, 2023

    Hi Ryan_Roberts_

     

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

     

    -Dev

    mschachtman
    mschachtman
    Level 2
    July 24, 2023

    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?

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