Comparison of different bot exclusion methods

Last update: 2024-01-12

The following table shows different methods of excluding bots and how they compare to each other.

Method	Bot Rules	Exclude by IP Address	Customer attributes	Segmentation	3-rd party scoring + Segmentation	Suppress Server Call for Bots at Runtime	Custom DB VISTA rule
Description of method for excluding data	Exclude based on user-agent, IP address, or IP address range	IP address	A flag in customer attributes that identifies ECID as a bot	Criteria in an Analytics segment that identifies known bots based on bot behavior	A 3rd party such as Perimeter X or Akamai Bot Manager assigns each page view a score on how likely it is to be a bot. Score is sent into Analytics and segments can be used to filter data out based on the score.	Client-side logic stops the Analytics server call from being executed for bots.	A VISTA rule will move traffic from bots that meet certain criteria to a separate report suite.
Bot names are available for reporting?	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	Yes
Able to see which pages are being visited by bots?	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	No	Yes
Incurs server call cost for bots?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Bot data available in data feeds?	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Able to report on bot traffic as if they are actual server calls?	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Can retroactively remove data from a data set?	No	No	Yes, once declared IDs are implemented	Yes	Yes, once scores are implemented	No	No
Is subject to Uniques limits in criteria?	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No
Is subject to additional cost?	No	No	Possibly, depending on Analytics SKU	No	Yes	No	Yes - cost to implement and maintain a VISTA rule

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