google adbot in my stats

FrancoPaddy

Hello,

I use this

if (!stripos($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"], "google")) {

to discount clicks made by the google adbot from my stats. This does keep most of the clicks made by this bot out of my stats (stats related to my adwords performance), but not all.

One of things I log is the IP address of the ad clicker and a lot of entries in my stats resolve back to Google.

I was wondering if there is a more efficient solution than this? It is a real pain having Google pollute these statistics.

Thanks in advance

efficacious

why don't you just start blocking those ip ranges from clicking on the ads?

FrancoPaddy

Thanks efficacious, the problem is that there is nothing stopping Google for instance from picking up new ip blocks and then I am back to square one.

I don't really want to be monitoring all the time, or having to wonder if google clicking is getting back into my stats again

efficacious

hmm afraid i do not know then.. i kno that phpbb has a way of tracking alot of different goolge bots but I'm not sure how they are doing it.. I assume they look for a refferer or ip but i really don't know..

it might be useful to pop over to phpbb.com and ask somone there how that system works.

FrancoPaddy

Good idea, efficaceous, I will try that 🙂

Ashley_Sheridan

You could always use gethostbyaddr() to get the hostname of the IP address. Hopefully this will always return the correct host if Google starts using new IP addresses.