Hi Martijn,

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I've enabled bot filtering on all views except my unfiltered view. My site gets so much bot traffic that the data would be unusable without it.

As for filtering the traffic, I'm not aware of any way to retroactively filter out User-Agent unless I use GTM to create a custom dimension as described here: https://www.addsearch.com/docs/analytics/addsearch-bot-google-analytics/

Perhaps this is something I should do in case something like this ever happens again in the future.
I'm still hoping for other suggestions - particularly ways to ask the Google Analytics team to include "whatstuffwherebot" as part of their bot filtering.

Best,
Akira

Starting yesterday, Aug 26, 2020, I noticed a new bot crawling our site with user agent whatstuffwherebot.

Google Analytics is counting these hits as human traffic, completely throwing off my numbers - yesterday, Analytics reported nearly triple my typical number of visitors.

As of now, Search Console only shows data through Aug 25 so I don't know if Search Console is also affected.

Is anybody else seeing something similar?

Does anybody know what the whatstuffwherebot bot is? I don't get any results when I search on Google or Bing.

For what it's worth, the traffic is coming from Columbus, OH, running over Amazon AWS via 278 different IP addresses so far. Also, WordFence (my WordPress security plugin) correctly identifies these hits as bot traffic.

Thanks, Peter. That's useful to know.

I ultimately found an easier solution. My situation is that I'm changing some URLs and I want to keep consistent tracking of my funnels/goals.

So if I changed a URL from say page1.htm to page2.htm, I was thinking I needed to define the associated funnel to be page1.htm OR page2.htm. However, I discovered that if I simply changed the funnel from the former to the latter, all of the historical data for page1.htm would be combined with new data collected for page2.htm. Thus, the logical operator wasn't necessary.

Trenton,

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm trying it your way and will test shortly!

Best,

Akira

When setting up a Funnel within Google Analytics, is it possible to use logical operators (e.g. OR, AND) in the first (required) step of the funnel? For example, suppose I want to track users who visit page1.html AND page2.html before proceeding to the destination goal.

I've entered two pages separated by the OR operator, and neither the "Verify this Goal" nor "Save" produces an error message - is it safe to assume that this is working as I intend?

Thanks in advance!

Thanks for all of the responses - this forum is a great resource!

Over 95% of my revenue comes from organic search; less than 5% comes from AdWords PPC (all other sources account for about 1-2%).

My ROI on AdWords is roughly zero. It's negative if you include opportunity costs.

My question is: if I pause all of my AdWords campaigns, is there ANY chance that my organic rankings (and organic click-through rates) will suffer?

This is really two questions. First, could Google retaliate to my reduced ad spending by dropping my rankings? Second, will searchers think differently about my organic link if they don't also see the accompanying paid link on the SERP?