Does anyone have a simple way to remove bot traffic from Google Analytics?

Top 2 tactics: Existing Users and Industry Influencers. First, leverage the existing user base. Incent referrals with $5 for every new free user they get to sign up and start using PT Engine for a new domain. Second, reach influencers and offer them the same deal when they tweet / post to / email their audiences. Make the offer a 60 day free trial instead of the standard 30 day so that they are providing value to the people they refer as well. This is critical - don't make them feel sleazy, make them feel (and look) like heroes to the connections they share PT Engine with. That's $9k to get 1800 users, leaving you $1k for graphics, referral tracking system, administrative costs. I assume the $10k budget does not include your time - if it does you'll have to reduce the incentive, which will definitely make it less appealing. If you want to dive deep on reaching influencers, schedule a call with me at www.clarity.fm/ryandraving

Try Intercom.io You get visitor level information on how active they are etc.

Depending on the data, you can either use one of the following. Google Spreeshet / Charts: I use this for real time analytics generated from our system to quickly visualize the information. There's a simple JSON API that lets you pull that in although their is limits on the amount of rows you can use. Geckoboard: They provide dashboard type widgets you can configure to show you real time trends and information. Highcharts.com: Simple chart generator. We use this in our Admin Dashboard to visualize all our data include cohorts and weekly KPI's. I like simple and free.

NO, there no current tools available.

It's unlikely I'm part of your target demographic for this question. But you've given me the opportunity to vent; therefore vent I shall! Gripe 1: Yesterday I spent hours writing a parser that takes a raw-text output from Bob's database and chops it up appropriately for insert into Bill's database. If Bob would just give Bill access to the database, then such a parser wouldn't be required. Gripe 2: I spend an inordinate amount of time coding up processes that really accomplish nothing but data entry. The tasks are too small for it to be worthwhile to program spiders to crawl the information sources, but they're too significant to neglect. I'd much rather outsource this stuff, but I spend more time explaining these one-off tasks to people overseas than it takes me to perform them myself! Gripe 3: Many of my data-collection tasks are massive and repetitive. Does anyone out there know a good source of trainable crawlers / scrapers? My difficulty is that I need them for a series of unpredictable mid-term tasks rather than a consistent long-term task.