How to Identify and Filter Out Bot Traffic in Google Analytics 4 by City or Country

If you notice a big influx of traffic to your website along with high bounce rates, low engagement, and an increased drop off from your homepage, you may be getting bot traffic. Typical culprits based on city are Ashburn, Boardman, Columbus, and Quebec City. A spike in users from particular regions that are unlikely to have a large number of people who are fluent in the native language of the site can be a sign of bot traffic too. As a result of this bot traffic, it can throw off your reporting.

As a solution, you can filter this traffic out. To do so by city, you'd go to the report → click the pencil in the upper right:

Select "+ Add filter":

Type in City under Dimension → select "does not match regex" under Match Type → add the city (or cities) to the Value field. If adding multiple cities. you can separate them with | and then select the Apply button:

Once applied, you can choose to Save it to the current report or as a new report:

You can also do this with a specific country/countries or all other countries besides the ones you do business in.

Don't do business internationally at all? You can go a step further and filter out all international traffic by adding another dimension. For Dimension, you'd choose Country → "matches regex" for Match Type → "United States" for Value (or United States|country you do business in|country you do business in):

Be careful with this, as you'll only want to filter out traffic that you know is bot traffic.

If you have any questions, please reach out to Success at success@haleymarketing.com!