The problem of countering the increase in bot traffic, often known as non-human traffic, has left publishers and advertisers scrambling.
Research by data security service company Barracuda Networks indicates that in the first half of 2021, bots constituted almost two-thirds of all internet traffic worldwide. In contrast, malicious bots were responsible for about 40% of all traffic.
One of the main causes of digital ad fraud is bot traffic, whose estimated cost will increase from $35 billion in 2018 to $100 billion in 2023.
In light of this, we have attempted to address several important queries regarding bot traffic in this post, including what it is, how to stop it, and how to delete it.
How can one recognize bot traffic?
Web developers are able to detect possible bot traffic by directly examining network queries made to their websites. Bot traffic detection is further enhanced by the use of an integrated web analytics solution, such as Heap or Google Analytics.
Bot traffic can be distinguished by the following analytics anomalies:
abnormally high pageviews: It’s possible that bots are browsing a website if there is an abrupt, unusual, and unexpected surge in pageviews.
abnormally high bounce rate: The bounce rate measures the proportion of visitors to a website’s single page that depart before clicking anywhere on the page. Bots directed at a single page may cause an unanticipated increase in the bounce rate.
Unexpectedly long or short session duration: Users should spend a fair amount of time on websites, and this duration should not fluctuate. An inexplicable rise in session duration may be a sign that bots are using the website abnormally slowly. On the other hand, bots that browse the website far more quickly than a human user can be the cause of an unanticipated decrease in session length.
Junk conversions: Form-filling or spam bots may be to blame for an increase in conversions that appear bogus, such as accounts created with fictitious email addresses or contact forms filled out with fictitious names and phone numbers.
Increase in traffic from an unexpected source: An abrupt increase in users from a certain region, especially one where it’s doubtful that many people speak the site’s native tongue, maybe a sign of bot traffic.
How are analytics harmed by bot traffic?
Unauthorized bot traffic can affect analytics data including page visits, bounce rate, session duration, user geolocation, and conversions, as was previously discussed. The site owner may become quite irritated with these metrics variations because it is very difficult to gauge the effectiveness of a website that is inundated with bot activity. Additionally, A/B testing and conversion rate optimization efforts are rendered ineffective by the statistical noise generated by bots.
How to use Google Analytics to filter bot traffic
The option to “exclude all hits from known bots and spiders” is available in Google Analytics (spiders are search engine bots that crawl webpages). Users can also supply a specific list of IP addresses that they want Google Analytics to ignore, provided that the source of the bot activity can be located.
These steps won’t stop all bots from interfering with analytics, but they will block some of them. Moreover, aside from interfering with traffic statistics, the majority of hostile bots have other goals, and these countermeasures only serve to protect analytics data and do little to lessen destructive bot activity.
How may performance be harmed by bot traffic?
An extremely popular method used by attackers to start a DDoS assault is sending enormous amounts of bot traffic. Certain DDoS assaults cause a website to get so much attack traffic that it overwhelms the origin server, making the website sluggish or completely inaccessible to genuine users.
In what ways might bot traffic harm a business?
Malicious bot traffic can financially cripple certain websites, even if it has no effect on their performance. Particularly at risk are websites that offer products with little inventory and those that depend on advertising.
Click fraud occurs when fraudulent ad clicks are triggered by bots that visit websites that provide advertising and click on different parts of the page. Ad revenue may initially increase as a result, however, online ad networks are highly skilled at identifying fake clicks. They will take action, typically in the form of removing the website and its owner from their network, if they feel that the website is engaging in click fraud. Because of this, website owners who run advertisements should always be on the lookout for bot-click fraud.
Bots that hoard inventory have the ability to target sites with low inventory. As the name implies, these bots visit e-commerce websites and fill their shopping carts with an excessive amount of items, preventing actual customers from being able to purchase those item. In certain circumstances, this may also lead to a manufacturer or supplier needlessly replenishing their inventory. The inventory hoarding bots are only intended to interfere with inventory availability; they never really buy anything.
How do websites handle traffic from bots?
The inclusion of a robots.txt file is the first step towards controlling or preventing bot traffic to a website. This file can be set up to completely exclude bots from accessing or interacting with a webpage. It gives instructions to the bots on how to crawl the page. It should be noted, though, that only good bots will follow the guidelines in robots.txt; malevolent bots will still be able to crawl websites despite this file.
Abuseful bot traffic can be reduced with the aid of several technologies. Bot traffic coming from a single IP address can be identified and stopped by a rate-limiting solution, but a lot of malicious bot activity will still be missed. In addition to rate limitation, a network engineer can examine the traffic on a site to spot questionable network requests and provide a list of IP addresses that a filtering tool like a WAF should block. Even after much work, this only blocks a small percentage of the harmful bot traffic.
The simplest and most efficient way to halt malicious bot traffic, aside from rate limitation and direct engineer intervention, is to use a bot control solution. Malicious bots can be stopped before they ever reach a website by using behavioral analysis and intelligence combined in a bot control solution. For instance, Cloudflare Bot Management employs machine learning and intelligence gathered from millions of Internet properties to proactively detect and halt bot activity. Super Bot Fight Mode gives smaller businesses the same insight and control over their bot traffic and is accessible on Pro and Business levels.
Bot Traffic: What Is It?
Any non-human traffic to a website or app is referred to as “bot traffic.” Although the phrase “bot traffic” is typically associated with negativity, bot traffic actually relies on the goal of the bots and isn’t always good or harmful.
Certain services, like search engines and digital assistants (like Siri and Alexa), depend on certain bots. These kinds of bots are generally welcomed on websites by businesses.
Malicious bots can also be employed for other reasons, such as data scraping, DDoS attack propagation, and credential stuffing. Unauthorized web crawlers, among other relatively innocuous “bad” bots, can induce click fraud and interfere with site analytics, making them a nuisance even in some cases
Bot traffic is estimated to make up more than 40% of all Internet traffic, with malevolent bots accounting for a sizable share of this traffic. That’s why a lot of businesses are searching for solutions to control the amount of bot traffic that visits their websites.
Any traffic to a website that is not human is referred to as bot traffic. Every website, be it a little, just launched startup or a massively popular news site, will eventually receive a certain amount of bot visits.
Although it’s a common misconception that bot traffic is always detrimental, this isn’t always the case. Without a doubt, some bot traffic is intended to be harmful and can have a detrimental impact on Google Analytics statistics. These web crawlers can be employed for data scraping, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and credential stuffing.
Still, some lawful bots are necessary for the functioning of some web services, such as search engines and virtual assistants. As a result, digital publishers must utilize their analytics data to distinguish between bot traffic’s good, bad, and ugly aspects and human behavior.
Sorting Out Good Bots from Bad Bots:
Both useful and dangerous bots exist. We go over how they vary below.
Well-made Bots
Among the many useful bots are, but are not restricted to:
SEO tool crawlers: Tool bots, such as the Semrush Bot, trawl your website to assist you in making defensible choices, such as enhancing meta tags and determining a page’s indexability. These bots are helpful in assisting you in adhering to SEO best practices.
Bots for site monitoring: These programs can keep an eye out for system failures and track how well your website is doing. To notify you of problems like outages and sluggish response times, we employ SemrushBot in conjunction with Site Audit and other tools. Maintaining optimal site performance and availability for your visitors is made easier with ongoing monitoring.
Crawlers for search engines: Bots, like Googlebot, are used by search engines to index and rank the pages on your website. Your webpages wouldn’t get indexed and customers wouldn’t find your company in search results if these bots weren’t crawling your website.
The operation of search engines
Unreliable Bots
Even if you might not frequently observe traffic from or indications of harmful bots, you should constantly be aware that you could be a target.
Among the bad bots are, but are not limited to:
- Scrapers: Without your consent, bots may take screenshots and duplicate content from your website. It is theft of intellectual property and a violation of copyright to publish that material elsewhere. The integrity of your brand could be jeopardized if consumers find copies of your content online.
- Spam bots: In addition to creating and disseminating phishing emails and phony social media profiles, bots can also produce and publish spam content. Spam can fool users into disclosing private information, which can undermine internet security.
- DDoS bots: By sending a deluge of fictitious traffic, DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) bots try to overload your servers and stop users from visiting your website. These bots can interfere with the functionality of your website, causing downtime and financial losses if customers are unable to get or purchase the goods they require.
Sorts of Bots to Be Wary of
As previously stated, certain types of bots are necessary to ensure that search engines and digital assistants function properly. Nonetheless, several search engine bots are specifically made to not harm websites or user experiences.
The following are the kinds of bot traffic to be aware of:
1. Click Bots:
False ad clicks are produced by click bots, which are employed in click spamming. This is regarded by most web publishers as the most harmful kind of bot, especially for those who use pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements. This is due to the fact that clickbots distort data analytics by mimicking site traffic, which drains advertising dollars pointlessly.
Click bots and download bots both tamper with real user engagement data. But instead of changing the number of ad clicks, they fabricate a bogus download count. This is especially relevant when a publisher offers a free ebook download as part of a marketing funnel. False performance data is produced by download bots, which generate fake downloads.
2. Bots that spam:
Form-filling bots, or spambots, are the most prevalent type of bot. Spambots are typically used to administer social media accounts that have been taken, generate fictitious user profiles, or scrape contact information, including phone numbers and email addresses. Additionally, they impede user interaction by disseminating inappropriate content, like:
- Comment spam, including spam with links
- Email phishing
- Redirects websites
- negative search engine optimization for rivals
3. Bots that Spy:
The reason spy bots got their name is that they behave just like spies. They pilfer data and information from websites, forums, chat rooms, social media platforms, and email accounts.
4. Robotic Scrapers:
The only purpose of scraper bots’ website visits is to steal content from publishers. A company’s website and its pages may be seriously threatened by scraper bots. They are produced by third-party scrapers that are used by rival businesses to steal important content, like product and pricing lists, which are then recycled and published on their websites.
5. False Bots:
Imposter bots mimic human behavior by posing as real users of a website. They are typically the ones behind DDoS attacks and aim to get over internet security measures.
Good Bot Traffic: What Is It?
What are other instances of beneficial bot traffic, given that the aforementioned examples are clearly cases of harmful bot traffic?
The following bots are real and intended to help with website and application maintenance.
1. Bots for Search Engines:
Among the “good” bots, search engine bots are the most visible and well-known. Web crawlers known as search engine bots assist website owners in getting their sites displayed in Google, Yahoo, and Bing search results. These bots are useful resources for SEO.
2. Keeping an eye on bots:
Publishers can maintain optimal performance and maintain the health and accessibility of their websites by keeping an eye on bot activity. Pinging the website automatically to make sure it is still up is how monitoring bots work. These bots are incredibly helpful to website owners since they will automatically notify the publisher if something breaks or the site goes offline.
3. Crawlers for SEO
Software known as SEO crawlers is used to retrieve and index websites and those of its rivals in order to offer statistics and analytics on page views, visitors, and content. Then, using these reports, web administrators may better organize their content to increase organic traffic, search exposure, and referral traffic.
4. Bots with Copyright:
In order to make sure that no one is utilizing copyrighted content unlawfully or without authorization, copyright bots scour the internet for images protected by copyright.
What does bot traffic that isn’t good look like?
In contrast to the beneficial bots we have just discussed, malicious bot traffic can cause significant harm to your website if it is not stopped. This can manifest as anything from spammy or fraudulent traffic to something far more disruptive like ad fraud.
Denial of Service (DDoS) Networks
One of the worst and oldest bots ever must be the DDoS bot.
Distributed denial of service bots are programs that are installed on gullible victims’ computers with the intention of bringing down a certain website or server.
DDoS attacks have historically been held accountable for creating large financial losses; according to Corero, a network security service provider, the average cost of an attack in the US is estimated to be $218,000 or more.
1. Internet scrapers:
Web scrapers harvest important information from websites, like email addresses and contact details.
They may be able to copy material and photos from websites and use them without authorization on other websites or social media pages.
2. Select Fraud Bots:
Many intelligent bots are creating malicious bot traffic that goes only to sponsored adverts. These bots participate in ad fraud, as opposed to bots that produce undesired website traffic.
As the name implies, this non-human traffic costs marketers billions of dollars annually by generating clicks to sponsored advertisements. Publishers have various reasons to use bot detection systems to assist sort out unlawful traffic, which is often masquerading as genuine traffic.
3. Security Vulnerabilities:
There are numerous malicious bots that scour millions of web pages for security holes and notify their developers of them.
These harmful bots are made to convey information to a third party, who may use it to hack websites or sell them, in contrast to real bots that alert the website owner.
4. Bots that spam:
Spam bots are programmed to post messages in the comment sections of websites that are created by the bot’s creator. Although CAPTCHA tests are intended to weed out software-driven account creation, these tests aren’t always effective, and these bots still need to generate accounts.
How Do Websites Get Affected by Bot Traffic?
It’s crucial to realize that the majority of scripts and programs created for bots are intended to carry out the same action repeatedly. The designer of the bot obviously wants to finish the job as soon as possible, but doing so could seriously harm your website.
Should businesses fail to recognize, control, and filter bot traffic, it has the potential to completely demolish their operations. Particularly at risk are websites that depend on advertising in addition to those that sell goods and merchandise with little stock.
Bots that visit websites with advertisements and click on different parts of the page might cause phony ad clicks. This is called click fraud, and although it might lead to an increase in ad revenue at first, online ad networks will typically prohibit the site and its owner from their network as soon as they discover the fraud.
Inventory hoarding bots have the ability to effectively shut down eCommerce sites with little inventory by packing carts full of goods that real customers are unable to buy.
If a bot keeps requesting data from your website, it may get slower. This implies that everyone who views the website will experience slowness, which might lead to serious problems for an online business. In extreme cases, an excessive amount of bot traffic may cause your entire website to go offline.
Luckily, this only occurs in the worst circumstances; bot traffic usually has little impact on your website. The following are signs that your website is being heavily trafficked by unauthorized bots:
- Increased page views
- excessive bandwidth use
- erroneous reports from Google Analytics
- Reduced conversion
- unwanted emails
- longer loading periods
- A higher rate of bounce
How to Spot Bot Activity Using Google Analytics and Other Programs
Search engine crawler bots are becoming more intelligent every day as we head toward a future that is heavily reliant on technology. According to an Imperva analysis from the previous year, bots made up about 41% of all Internet traffic, with malicious bots accounting for over 25% of all traffic.
Bot traffic can be detected by web publishers and designers through network queries to their websites. Website owners can further assist themselves in identifying traffic bots in their website traffic by employing an integrated analytics platform, like Google Analytics.
Bot traffic is characterized by the following features:
1. Unusual High Pageview Volume:
Bots are typically the cause of an abrupt, unusual, and unanticipated surge in page views on a website.
2. Unusual High Rate of Bounces:
The percentage of visitors to your website that leave without doing anything is known as the “bounce rate,” which is a metric. Bots sent to a single page may be the cause of an unanticipated rise in bounce rate.
3. Unexpectedly Long or Short Session:
The amount of time visitors spend on a website once they arrive is known as the session duration. Because of the way people behave, this needs to stay consistently stable. On the other hand, a sudden and unexpected increase in session duration probably means that a bot is visiting the website abnormally slowly.
On the other hand, an abnormally short session duration can be a sign that a bot is seeing pages far more quickly than a human.
4. Recycled Materials:
A spike in the quantity of phony conversions can be used to identify junk conversions. A rise in accounts being created with absurd email addresses or contact forms with fictitious names, phone numbers, or addresses are sign of junk conversions.
5. Traffic Increase from an Unexpected Source:
Another common sign of bot activity is an abrupt increase in website traffic from a particular place, especially one where it is doubtful that native speakers of the language the site is published in reside.
How to Put an End to Bot Activity
After a business or agency has mastered the art of spotting bot traffic, it is critical that they acquire the skills and resources required to prevent bot traffic from adversely impacting their website.
The following resources can reduce risks:
1. Appropriate Arbitrage:
The practice of paying to drive traffic to a website in order to guarantee high-yield PPC/CPM-based campaigns is known as traffic arbitrage. The danger of malicious bot traffic can be decreased for website owners by only acquiring traffic from reputable suppliers.
2. Make use of Robots.txt:
Adding a robots.txt file to a website will help keep malicious bots away.
3. Using JavaScript in Alerts:
When a bot enters a website, site owners can install contextual JavaScript (JS) to notify them.
4. DDoS Enumerations:
To lessen the frequency of DDoS assaults, publishers might gather a list of objectionable IP addresses and block those visit requests on their websites.
5. Employ Tests of Type-Challenge Response:
By using CAPTCHA on the registration or download form, you may identify bot traffic in one of the easiest and most popular ways possible. This is especially helpful in preventing spambots and downloads.
6. Evaluate Log Files:
Examining server error log files can assist web administrators with a deep understanding of statistics and analytics in identifying and resolving bot-caused website faults.
How to Use Google Analytics to Find Bot Traffic
There are a few easy ways for publishers to utilize Google Analytics to configure their websites to weed out automated traffic.
- First, open your Google Analytics account and log in.
- Go to the Google Analytics Admin Panel.
- Proceed to the View tab and select View Settings.
- Locate the Bot Filtering checkbox by swiping it down.
- If the checkbox isn’t ticked, click Check.
- At last, select Save.
Why Is Protecting Your Ads Important?
Bot traffic will eventually affect any website with Pay Per Click advertisements in one way or another. Publishers must take immediate action to safeguard their ads, or bot traffic will eventually result in the following problems:
- Analytics and data from websites could get biased.
- Performance and load times for websites may start to decline.
- Websites are exposed to DDoS attacks, botnets, and eventually poor search engine optimization.
- CPC suffers, and revenue loss may eventually result.
Conclusion:
Bot traffic is something that should not be disregarded because, for any business that has a website, it can become very expensive. Purchasing a dedicated bot management solution has proven to be the most effective way to decrease abusive bot traffic, despite the existence of various other strategies.
FAQs:
1. Internet Bots: What Are They?
Any traffic to a website that is not human is considered an internet bot. They behave and look nearly human, but their creator created them with the intention of using them for a certain duty.
2. Why Do Bots Visit Websites?
Bots can visit a website to assess SEO and evaluate its search engine rankings. Malicious bots, on the other hand, can visit a website to perform DDoS assaults, generate phishing accounts, or steal contact information.
3. Is It Appropriate to Block Bots?
Websites should permit bots to visit their sites in order to track their health and assess their search ranking, as not all bots are harmful. Websites must to utilize CAPTCHA, though, in order to prevent scraping, spamming, and other harmful bot activity.
4. Does SEO Affect Bot Traffic?
SEO is negatively impacted by malicious bots. They accomplish this by orchestrating DDoS assaults and slowing down a website’s load and response times.
5. False Traffic: What Is It?
The quantity of non-human visitors, or bots, that visit a website is referred to as fake traffic. They are seen as phony since they are not actual clients or persons.
6. Do Legal Traffic Bots Exist?
Although some US state governments have begun to take action against malicious bots, traffic bots are still regarded as lawful. The legality of traffic bots might be questioned nationally if this trend keeps up.
7. Describe a search bot.
Search engines employ search engine bots, sometimes referred to as search bots, to sift through web pages and rank their appearances in relation to user searches.
8. Define Referral Spam.
When bots fabricate website traffic in order to cram spammy links into a Google Analytics referral report, this is known as referral spam. The intention is to get a GA user to click on the link, which will lead them to a service scam or website infected with malware.
9. Are Crawlers Allowed in Direct Traffic?
Search crawlers may occasionally be included in direct traffic. The majority of crawlers are often filtered out by Google Analytics, however, occasionally some are still mistakenly reported as human traffic.
10. What Is The Bot Traffic Percentage On The Internet?
Barracuda Networks conducted a study in 2021 and found that 66% of all internet traffic is generated by bots, of which 40% is harmful.
