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The question posed by Daniel Waisberg of Search Engine Land: Is Googlebot Skewing Google Analytics Data?
His Findings: "If we look at the behavior of this bot, we see a very low time on site, very low pages/visit, and very high percentage of new visits. This might be due to the fact that the bot does not fetch cookies, which is essential to accurate analytics tracking....
Statistically speaking, this means that the Googlebot is an outlier, which is a data point that lies outside of the overall pattern of a distribution. It means that it can distort the numbers. In the example above, just a few visits with very low time on site and percentage of new visits can significantly decrease the overall average time on site andpercentage of new visitors, which is clearly bad for someone looking at the overall behavior of visitors."
Waisberg offers a solution to this in the form of creating a filter to exclude Googlebot from your Google Analytics profile.
Naturally, I would have assumed that visit duration and frequency wouldn't include Google's own bots when using Google Analytics, but it's nice to know there is a solution.
Google Analytics appears to have responded to that post today:
The official Google bot does not execute Google Analytics javascript. We’re not sure what it is exactly, it could be anyone’s bot, some intern’s experiment, or other such traffic.
Is Googlebot Skewing Google Analytics Data?
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