Amazon Keyword in Google Analytics Organic Traffic from Bing

If you study your keywords report in Google Analytics from time to time, you must have noticed this weird keyword ‘amazon’ coming from bing / organic which is completely irrelevant to your website content:

If you have seen this, you’re not alone. In one of my accounts, I see that it appeared last October.

Where Does this Amazon Traffic Come From?

This traffic seems to come from bots. But they definitely know what website they are targeting as the hostname is not random, it will contain your real domain name (thus, this traffic won’t be filtered out by a hostname filter if you have one in place).

If you look into details, this ‘amazon’ keyword traffic has the following attributes:

• Source: bing / organic
• Browser: Internet Explorer
• City: New York, Santa Clara, San Jose, Boston, etc. (all from the USA)
• Hostname: your domain name
• Landing page: the homepage
• Client ID (I have it as a Custom Dimension): always different
• Device Category: Desktop
• Service Provider: Private Customer

So these bots come from organic Bing results (I don’t think this is a real referral source), go to the homepage using Internet Explorer and constantly change the Client ID. Everything is very typical of bots behaviour.

There is nothing really special about the mentioned attributes that could be used to create an exclusion filter. But if we dig deeper and check other parameters like ‘Network Domain’, there is something interesting:

I also checked a ‘Network Domain’ dimension for other keywords to make sure that none of them has the same value as ‘amazon’ (you should do this too). Luckily, this dimension is unique for this bot, so I’ll use it to exclude spam traffic with a filter.

How to Remove Amazon Keyword Traffic from Google Analytics

You can create a filter in the appropriate view of your Google Analytics:

1. Navigate to Admin -> Filters -> Add Filter
2. Name your filter (e.g. Exclude Amazon organic keyword)
3. Filter Type: Custom
4. Exclude -> Filter Field: ISP Domain
5. Filter Pattern: paloaltonetworks.com
6. Verify the Filter

In order to exclude the ‘amazon’ keyword traffic from bing in your past reports, create a custom segment:

1. Add Segment
2. Choose ‘Custom’ and go to ‘Conditions’ under Advanced
3. Exclude: Network domain – contains – paloaltonetworks.com

After creating the segment, I can verify that it works:

Your Turn

Have you seen this traffic from Bing? if not, go and check your Google Analytics, chances are high that your organic report has this ‘amazon’  keyword.

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