While there have been complicated workarounds for discounting bots in Google Analytics, Google has never offered a way for users to automatically filter various bots.  However, with more bots executing javascript, which executes the Google Analytics script on the page, it is definitely causing some users’ data to become skewed, particularly if they get hit hard by a bot gone beserk.

Fortunately for advertisers, Google is finally giving us the option.  Google Analytics has announced a new way to filter bot traffic automatically with a new setting in the management user interface.

The new option will automatically remove the “known bots” from reporting in Google Analytics.  This is still turned off by default, so users will need to turn the option on in order to utilize it.  However, there are reports that it doesn’t work retroactively.

It can be applied on a site by site basis, so you can enable filtering of bots on some sites, while leaving bots included in reporting on other sites.

When viewing the site you wish to filter bots on, click the “Admin” link at the top of the page and in the View column, select “View Settings”.

The option is now available for all Google Analytics users.