BOTS BOTS BOTS !! Views and Visits

[BluebellKnickKnacks]

Hey everyone,  does anybody know how to get rid of bots that are affecting my Views and Visits stats.  I have read other discussions on this forum and one person suggested putting my shop on holiday - which I did for a week - but to no avail, the bots were still there when I reopened my shop.  I have tried contacting Etsy but, what a surprise, got a generic reply with no help whatsoever. 

Does anybody have any other suggestions please ?

[BluebellKnickKnacks]

My views and visits are 5 times the numbers I usually get for my shop

[CraftyasElleUK]

Bots are a standard thing for all webpages. They're typically called "crawlers", they are used by search engines ala Google to check web pages. 

[JosephinePainting]

How do you know they're bots?

[hopeandjoystudios]

Why does it matter? Not being snarky..just wondering why it would matter? The only stat that matters is a sale unless you are trying to track ad spend or social media traffic? But would that not be separated out anyways from bot views?

[BluebellKnickKnacks]

Snarky or not !!  it affects my conversion rate and I do not have any true indication of what people are looking at in my store - which I (me) find very helpful in operating my shop !

[BrightnoseBooks]

I have this issue too and they seem to be a lot worse in the last couple of weeks. I get a big spike in visits at 2 or 3 am and I notice that the views are mostly for sold-out items. This used to happen occasionally (I once had a spike of about 2000 visits in one hour- my visits average about 50 a day! Really messed up my stats) but they're pretty frequent now. I notice they tend to come in waves and then settle, hopefully they'll die down a bit soon. Unfortunately I don't think there's anything much we can do about it. 

[BagmakerSupply]

@BluebellKnickKnacks: Neither you nor Etsy have any control over which bots crawl Etsy pages - even if the robots.txt says to ignore the page it is still up to the bot to respect that.

[PrettyVagrant]

Etsy when they changed stats last to be more delegated was to take the time to filter the bots out of our stats to show more realistic stats.  
when this doesn’t happen conversion rates are affected, which is part of our shops score

[PrettyVagrant]

At least once a week my shop gets hit, sometimes more than once.  It kills my conversion rate because they are not getting filtered from our stats like they are supposed to.  

I reached out with proof and they would not escalate the issue.