If you have followed blogs here, you’ll know that we enumerate unique news and various strategies, particularly when they bring something distinctive to the global market. Primarily this Bot traffic describes any non-human traffic to a website or an app. The key term bot traffic carries a negative connotation, but in reality, bot traffic isn’t necessarily good or bad; it all wholly depends on the requirements of the bots.
Some bots are important for beneficial services such as search engines and digital assistants. Most firms welcome these sorts of bots on their sites. Whereas the other bots can be malicious, for instance, those utilized for the purposes of data scraping, credential stuffing, and launching DDoS attacks. Even more benign bad bots, namely unauthorized web crawlers, could be baleful since they can disrupt site analytics and develop click fraud.
It is trusted that over 40% of all Internet traffic is primarily comprised of bot traffic, and a good portion of that is malicious bots. Thereby so many firms are searching for ways to manage the bot traffic coming to their sites.
How Could Bot Traffic Be Identified?
Web engineers could look directly at network requests to their sites and immediately identify likely bot traffic. An integrated web analytics tool namely Google Analytics or Heap could assist to detect bot traffic.
Analytics Anomalies Are The Hallmarks Of Bot Traffic
Abnormally High Pageviews
In case of a site undergoes a sudden, unprecedented and unexpected spike in page views, they are likely that there are bots mostly clicking through the site.
Abnormally High Bounce Rate
If the bounce rate primarily identifies the number of users that come to a single page on a site and then instantly leave the site before clicking anything on the page. Also, an unexpected lift in the bounce rate could be the result of bots being directed at a single page.
More Surprisingly High or Low Session Duration
It is enumerated that session duration, or the number of times users stays on a website, must remain relatively steady. If any unexplained increase in session duration could be just an indication of bots browsing the site at an unusually slow kind of rate. Also, an unexpected drop-in session duration could be the result of bots that are just clicking through pages on the site much quicker than a human user would.
Junk Conversions
You have a surge in phoney-looking conversions, namely as account creations utilizing gibberish email addresses or kind of contact forms submitted with fake names and phone numbers, which could be the result of form-filling bots or absolute spambots.
Spike in Traffic from an Unexpected Location
If a sudden spike in users from one specific region, a region that’s unlikely to have a huge number of people who are fluent in the native language of the site, could be an indication of bot traffic.
How Can Bot Traffic Hurt Analytics?
It is said that unauthorized bot traffic could impact analytics metrics namely bounce rate, page views, geolocation of users, session duration, and conversions. These key deviations in metrics could develop a lot of frustration for the site owner; it is difficult to measure the performance of a site that’s being crowded with bot activity. There are attempts to ameliorate the site, respectively as A/B testing and conversion rate optimization, are also primarily crippled by the statistical noise developed by bots.
How to Filter Bot Traffic from Google Analytics
Google Analytics does offer the option to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders” spiders are searching engine bots that crawl webpages. If the source of the bot traffic could be identified, the users can also offer a particular list of IPs to be ignored by Google Analytics.
These measures would stop some bots from disrupting analytics, they won’t stop all bots. Also, most malicious bots pursue an objective apart from disrupting traffic analytics, and these adept measures do nothing to mitigate baleful bot activity outside of properly preserving analytics data.
How Can Bot Traffic Hurt Performance?
It is enumerated that sending massive amounts of bot traffic is a general way for attackers to properly launch a DDoS attack. During some kinds of DDoS attacks, so much attack traffic is wholly directed at a website that the origin server becomes overloaded, and the site slows down or is altogether unavailable for legitimate global users.
There are a number of tools that could assist mitigate abusive bot traffic. A rate-limiting solution could detect and primarily prevent bot traffic originating from a single IP address, although this would still overlook a lot of malicious bot traffic. Even rate limiting, a network engineer could look at a site’s traffic and simply identify suspicious network requests, offering a list of IP addresses to be blocked by a filtering tool such as a WAF. It is a labour-intensive process and could still only stop a portion of the malicious bot traffic.
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