With Shopify now introducing a human vs. bot filter in reporting (for metrics like conversion rate, traffic, clicks, etc.), why doesn’t the analytics dashboard default to excluding bot sessions?
Right now, the default dashboards still include bot traffic, which can significantly skew core metrics. Conversion rate in particular becomes unreliable if bot sessions are inflating the denominator.
I’ve had to create custom dashboard modules just to filter out bot traffic and essentially ignore the default homepage analytics entirely. That feels backwards, especially now that Shopify clearly has the capability to distinguish between human and bot sessions.
If the goal is to provide merchants with actionable insights, shouldn’t the default view prioritize clean, human-only data?
Curious if there’s a specific reason for this, or if others are running into the same issue.
The human vs bot filter is a pretty new feature (only months old). It may take quite some time for Shopify to make the dashboard to automatically filter out bot sessions, if ever… Their own crawlers show up in the bot sessions.
Yeah this has been bugging me too. The fact that Shopify already has the bot/human filter built in but still defaults to showing everything feels like an odd choice.
My guess is they keep bot traffic visible by default because filtering it out could make some merchants think their traffic dropped overnight, which would cause a whole different wave of support tickets. Not great reasoning, but I can see why they’d be cautious about changing the default.
What I ended up doing is bookmarking the filtered view so I never land on the default dashboard anymore. Not ideal but saves time vs. rebuilding custom reports every time. The conversion rate difference is pretty eye-opening once you strip out the bots though. For one store I was looking at, the “real” conversion rate was almost 2x the reported number.
Are you seeing a big gap between filtered and unfiltered on your end?
Shopify’s analytics don’t do much to filter bot traffic because reliable bot detection is genuinely hard — there’s a huge gray area between obvious crawlers and sophisticated bots that mimic real users. Filtering aggressively risks undercounting real sessions, so they err on the side of including everything.
Your best workaround is using Google Analytics with the tag set up properly, since it does a better job filtering known bots. You can also compare GA sessions vs Shopify sessions — the gap between those two numbers roughly tells you how much bot traffic you’re dealing with.
Adding another data point from a Shopify Plus merchant experiencing the same issue.
From August 1-10, Singapore generated 16,105 sessions, or 41% of our total website traffic, while generating zero orders. This traffic had a 99.29% bounce rate and an average session duration of about 0.75 seconds. During the same period, our reported conversion rate more than halved.
This creates a real reporting problem. Our management team relies on Shopify’s headline reporting, and a conversion rate decline of that magnitude would normally flag a potential website, checkout, or business-performance issue. In this case, the metric is being materially distorted by apparent bot traffic.
Shopify does provide a Human or bot session filter, and custom filtered reports can be added to the Analytics page. The limitation is that the Analytics page is customized per user and cannot be shared as a standardized dashboard across team members. The Shopify Home metrics also cannot be filtered in the same way.
Ideally, Shopify would:
Allow Human/Bot filtering to be applied to Shopify Home metrics.
Allow users to create multiple custom Analytics dashboards and share view or edit access with specific team members or external stakeholders.
Saved individual reports are helpful, but they are not an efficient substitute for a single, shared executive dashboard with consistent reporting across users.
We have also experienced similar anomalous traffic surges from other regions in the past, so this is not a one-time issue for us. I hope Shopify considers improving both bot filtering and dashboard sharing, as inaccurate headline metrics can lead merchants to investigate or make decisions based on traffic that is not representative of actual customers.