Do bots affect Google Analytics and ad performance?
Yes. Bot sessions inflate traffic, depress measured conversion rate, poison retargeting audiences, and can burn ad budget through fake clicks.
If bot sessions reach your analytics, every rate built on sessions is wrong: conversion rate is understated because bots never buy, engagement metrics are distorted, and A/B tests can be skewed. On the paid side, click fraud spends budget directly, and bots cookied on your site enter retargeting pools - you pay to advertise to software.
Filtering bots inside analytics helps reporting but does not stop the spend or the scraping. Blocking hostile automation at the network edge, before requests reach the storefront and its pixels, fixes the problem at the source.