Bots messing up my analytics

[MrBlack]

They started coming about 2 months ago....

I get bots masquerading as visitors directly hitting pages on one of my websites and messing up my stats. Most of them originate from US ip addresses as well as a few from Canada and random European countries.

They all have the same characteristics of Mac OS 10 with the Firefox browser and screen resolution of 1280x1024.

Its driving me nuts. It is not a high traffic website, only a couple of hundred uniques a day so with 50 or so hits from these bots it is really messing with my analytics.

Is there any way I can block these? I cannot block ip addresses because they appear to be random.

[RhinoFish]

Blocking IPs won't work, most of them are not even hitting your page, they are calling the Analytics script, feeding info into Analytics without site visits.

Analytics has a setting to block known bots and spiders.
The rest, you'll have to manually filter.

And if you Google it (try "block analytics referrer spam"), by now, someone must have a paid service by now.

[NickMNS]

To tell if these bots are referral spam check the hostname. To do that go it into GA, Left side bar > Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Then click on the Secondary Dimension button, go to Behavior > hostname. The report will show you the different hostnames for each channel. You should only see you domain name as the host, if you see other hosts, that is the sign of a referral-bot.

[MrBlack]

Checked the GA report and do not see any other hostnames. I checked server logs too and they are actually hitting the pages.
It's a bit weird. Just looks like a bunch of identical zombies hitting every page of my website. I guess I will just have to live with it and hope they will eventually clear off.

[keyplyr]

Are the request headers valid? Usually that's the best indicator for browser spoofing and one of several attributes you can use to block.