Bots. They are everywhere. Search Bots. AI Bots. Spam Bots. They also affect your web analytics, and could give you analytics data that doesn’t make sense at all. And when you need to make decisions from your web analytics data, you normally don’t want your analytics data contaminated by random bots. In some cases we have seen that up to 60 percent of visitors came from bots.
Bots eat resources, and are bad for the environment, as they could make the resources you need to run a website doubled, or more.
Matomo competitors, like Piwik Pro and Google Analytics, hide the most common bots, without telling you which bots they have removed and when. That is not good, you need the data to react and solve the issues that bots create without reading your server logs. Of course, there are bots that you do want on your website, and you need ways to get reports of good and bad bots.
By default, Matomo tracks no bots for your site visits. All bots identified by the Device Detctor plugin are normally excluded. But as it is easy to extend functionality in Matomo, we have invested a lot of time in the Matomo plugin Bot Tracker, and partly using the built-in device detector to give you reports about the bots visiting your website.
So with the Bot Tracker plugin in Matomo, you now know about the bots visiting your website, when and how often. So now, you are in control of the bots, and can act on them, like create rules in your web server to step them, or edit your robots.txt to limit the good bots.
And like many other plugins we have developed, Bot Tracker is open source, and available for download on the Matomo Marketplace, and for our Matomo SaaS customers is included by default. Try it out!
Want Matomo SaaS with Bot Tracking included? Contact us!