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The company I work at creates lots of mobile apps. Some app developers have added code to hit oursite.com to check for things like connectivity. So, I get thousands of hits every day that aren't actual users, but apps just checking for a connection.

Is there anything I can do on my end, in Google Analytics to reduce the amount of traffic showing up from these pings. The most specific commonality I can come up with is that they are direct hits, from mobile devices, hitting only the home page "/".

Is there a way to filter traffic with that criteria? Anything else you can think of that would ensure I don't filter out legitimate traffic?

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    Google Analytics isn't triggered unless the JavaScript is run. A check for connectivity wouldn't do anything but download the page HTML, no?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Oct 8, 2014 at 2:06
  • Good point. The mobile traffic must be loading the page in a traditional browser instead of just pinging it. However based on the behavior (extremely high exit rate, only ever hitting "/"), I am still convinced this is happening in the background unknown to the user... And I still have no idea how to filter it out.
    – Justin
    Commented Oct 9, 2014 at 18:50

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Could your app developers check for connectivity on a page like "testconn.php" instead of "/". That way you can just exclude that page from your reports.

You can filter if the hits are coming from the same host/network/provider, IP address/IP range or maybe a unique browser version. If you can find a common factor in these then you can filter it this way.

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  • It turns out the traffic was coming from a mobile ad no one knew was running. That traffic is just too random to be able to filter it. To fix we will disable the ad or add a ?source={ad} parameter to the URL.
    – Justin
    Commented Oct 13, 2014 at 15:27

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