We are told that Mozilla compatible agent traffic in Google Analytic reporting is 100% bot driven traffic. Can you provide any info contrary to this notion.
I have clients that say all the traffic identified under browsers in Google Analytics as Mozilla Compatible Agent is robotically driven. I contend that a decent percentage of that traffic is in fact solid real traffic in responding to our email broadcasts. Can you cite any documentation that can verify a portion of MCA traffic is in fact real or please point me to any further documentation on this issue. Thanks, Steve Dickman
PS. Also, any explanation as to why there is separate Firefox traffic on the attached report in addition to, but separate from the MCA traffic highlighted here?
Isisombululo esikhethiwe
Hi Steve, I can't tell you what Google lumps into MCA traffic. My guess is that it is something they can't identify more specifically, but you may be able to drill down with the GA console to see more detail.
There are many different analytics companies; unfortunately I think you need to read their marketing materials and then make an assessment about which make sense for you.
Segment has a page where you can view them "by popularity" as a starting point. https://segment.com/catalog (I do legal work for Segment, whose products lets you use a single API to send data from sites/apps to multiple analytics and other services.)
Funda le mpendulo ngokuhambisana nalesi sihloko 👍 0All Replies (4)
This does not belong in Firefox support as it about things that we can't even control. User-Agent can be set to whatever you want, so applications or bots can set them to emulate Firefox or any other browser.
Hi Steve:
You probably are familiar with user agent strings sent to web servers as part of the request for some resource. For example:
Firefox 55 on 64-bit Windows 7: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:55.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/55.0
Chrome 60 on 64-bit Windows 7: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.101 Safari/537.36
Internet Explorer 11 on 64-bit Windows 7: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
(See yours on my test page at: https://www.jeffersonscher.com/res/jstest.php)
Now as jagan605 points out, this can be changed to pretty much anything you want. The only constraint is that some servers block unwanted user agents so in order to get your request fulfilled, you have to work around those constraints.
Google Analytics uses some "secret sauce" to parse the different strings in a way that lets you look at general trends and also some levels of detail. If you do not believe GA successfully sorted the real users from the bots, you could try the stats packages in the hosting console for the relevant server, or use a different analytics service.
jscher2000, any thoughts on a specific quality analytic service alternative?
Also, so you are saying MCA traffic is just there to reveal a possible "bad" trend and none of that traffic should be considered real?
Thanks for your help!!!
Isisombululo Esikhethiwe
Hi Steve, I can't tell you what Google lumps into MCA traffic. My guess is that it is something they can't identify more specifically, but you may be able to drill down with the GA console to see more detail.
There are many different analytics companies; unfortunately I think you need to read their marketing materials and then make an assessment about which make sense for you.
Segment has a page where you can view them "by popularity" as a starting point. https://segment.com/catalog (I do legal work for Segment, whose products lets you use a single API to send data from sites/apps to multiple analytics and other services.)