Official Group for Steamworks Development Support

UTM Analytics Improvements: Better Bot Detection

We recently rolled out an improvement to our UTM Analytics data. This change enhances bot detection to give developers more accurate information about their store page traffic and their marketing efforts off-Steam.

UTM Analytics provide insights into how marketing campaigns are performing. However, ads and links on the internet are visited by more than just human beings. Scrapers, bots, and other tools make up an ever-increasing percentage of traffic. To make sure the data displayed on the UTM Analytics dashboard is useful, we are updating our definitions for "trusted visits."

Since UTM Analytics first launched on Steam a few years ago, web traffic from non-human sources has increased and become more varied. We're making this update to how we bucket the traffic in response to external activity on the web, rather than anything unique to Steam.

The reported "Trusted Visits" number will be lower, but more accurate, for most games moving forward due to the removed non-human traffic. Developers will generally see a larger delta between total visits and trusted visits. These changes have no impact to player privacy. As always, Steam IDs or other personal information will never be included or available.

Tracked visits, the number representing visits by users signed into Steam, is not affected by this change.

This change went into effect on November 18th. Visits recorded prior to that date are not retroactively affected.

If you run into any difficulties using our UTM tools, or you have feedback for how we can make this resource more valuable for developers, reach out to the Steam Business Team.