Get in touch!
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
February 19, 2025
Fullstory has some great features for maximizing the accuracy of your analytics but it takes some nuance to get the most out of these features. Our recent webinar covered essential strategies for identifying and blocking low-value traffic in Fullstory, ensuring your data remains accurate and actionable. Here’s a quick recap, and don’t forget to watch the full recording for a deeper dive!
A few quick disclaimers:
✦ The recording includes visuals from a demo Fullstory site, features available within your Fullstory instance may differ.
✦ Fullstory continues to make changes and improvements to the product, so if you’re watching this recording at a later date, know that some changes to features, functionality, and user interface may have occurred.
✦ The below recap was supported in part with AI, so to ensure complete accuracy of webinar contents, please watch the webinar itself.
If your Fullstory instance is flooded with automated or low-value traffic, it can impact the reliability of your metrics so blocking it those sessions would yield:
More Accurate Metrics – Removing junk traffic ensures that your funnels, conversion rates, and session insights reflect real user behavior.
Efficient Session Usage – Fullstory has a limited number of sessions, and blocking unnecessary traffic prevents wastage on non-human interactions.
We explored multiple ways to detect automated traffic within Fullstory, including:
• Self-Declaring Bots – Some bots identify themselves through their device type, operating system, or browser settings. These can be easily filtered using event refinements.
• Synthetic Monitoring Traffic – Tools like Datadog generate artificial sessions to check for broken links. If these sessions aren’t valuable to your analysis, they should be excluded.
• Suspicious User Behavior – Bots often exhibit strange navigation patterns, such as jumping sequentially between page elements.
• User Agent Analysis – Older browser versions (e.g., Chrome 88) are common among bot traffic. Reviewing user agents helps spot and block outdated or suspicious sources.
Once identified, there are two primary ways to prevent bot traffic from interfering with your analytics:
• Session Filtering – Use refinements and segment-level exclusions to remove junk traffic from reports without completely blocking it.
• Blocking Traffic in Fullstory Settings – To fully prevent junk sessions, utilize Fullstory’s settings to block traffic via IP address, location, or user agent rules. You can do this by enabling Fullstory’s built-in bot blocklist to filter out known automated traffic and/or manually add outdated or suspicious user agents to prevent synthetic traffic from consuming valuable sessions.
Fullstory also flags suspicious activities, such as potential security threats (e.g., XSS or SQL injection attempts). However, note that masked input fields are not analyzed, nor are redacted sections of a URL. As a result, the suspicious activity event will never fire on those areas.
This summary just scratches the surface. In the full webinar, we walk through step-by-step demonstrations on identifying and blocking bot traffic effectively. By implementing these techniques, you can ensure that your Fullstory analytics remain clean, accurate, and focused on real user interactions. Watch the Webinar Now.
Check out our other webinars in this series:
• Fullstory Level Up Series - Technical Dive Into Journeys and Retentions - December 2024
.png){kind=logo}
