We recently published a blog explaining why many websites have seen a surge in direct traffic from China and Singapore.
Many website owners have experienced an increase in direct traffic to their site in recent months, which has skewed the accuracy of their performance data in Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
This pattern has been attributed to non-human traffic from Singapore, as well as Lanzhou in China. These bots were getting past filtering systems and inflating performance figures.
Until an official solution is released, you can manually filter out this suspected bot traffic in GA4.
In this guide, we’ll show you two simple methods to help you clean up your reports.
Temporary report filtering
To temporarily remove suspected bot traffic from China and Singapore, you can apply a filter from your reports. This method only affects the report you are viewing and does not permanently remove data.
1. In your Google Analytics property, navigate to any standard report, such as the user acquisition report. You can do this by clicking Reports – Acquisition – User Acquisition.
2. At the top of the report, click the ‘Add filter’ button.
3. A panel will appear on the right-hand side of the report. Set the dimension to Country, set the match type to ‘does not match regex’ and add ‘China|Singapore’ to the value. This tells GA4 to exclude any sessions where the country is China or Singapore from the report results.
4. Click Apply to update the report. The chart and table will refresh, now only showing data with this traffic removed.
Use segments in Explore
If you would prefer more control over your data, you can set up a custom segment in the Explore section of Google Analytics 4. Segments let you hide certain visits, making it easier to see how real users are behaving on your site. You can reuse this segment across your explore reports.
1. In your Google Analytics property, navigate to the Explore report. You can do this by clicking ‘Explore’ in the left-hand menu.
2. Create a new exploration using the blank template.
3. On the left-hand side of the report, you’ll see a column titled ‘Segments’. Click the + icon, click ‘Create a new segment’ and ‘Session segment’.
4. A settings panel will open. Click ‘Add group to exclude’ and ‘Add new condition’. Choose ‘Country’ as the dimension. Click ‘Add filter’ and change the conditions to ‘Exactly matches’ and ‘China’. This tells GA4 to exclude any sessions where the country is China.
5. To create another exclusion, click ‘Or’ and repeat the steps above, clicking ‘Add new condition’, ‘Country., ‘Add filter’, ‘Exactly matches’, ‘Singapore. Now both countries will be excluded from the segment.
6. Name the segment something memorable, such as ‘Remove Singapore and China traffic’, so you can easily recognise it later, then click Apply.
Until Google announces an official fix, filtering out this suspected bot traffic is the best way to keep your analytics data as accurate as possible.
Need help analysing your website’s performance data in Google Analytics 4? Get in touch with the team of experts at Engage Web today to see how we can help.
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