How To Detect Bot Traffic On Your Website

Today, bots are incredibly important in the digital world. With more than 50% of internet traffic automated, bots and crawlers play a vital role in the worldwide online environment.

These bots are everywhere on the internet, created to perform multiple tasks.. There are, however, both good and bad bots. Good bots deliver your search results, automate repetitive tasks, offer automated customer support, and help you via chatbots. 

While bad bots spread viruses and malware, account takeovers and brute force attacks also lead to click fraud and ad fraud.

However, Bad bots are becoming more intelligent. They are more likely to go unnoticed in the current digital world, leading to cybercrime accounting for more than $1 trillion in lost revenue each year, with ad fraud and click fraud being the leading causes.

Also, To increase the revenue for ad clicks and create the fake traffic, bots may be employed to click on your advertising automatically from shady websites.

However, The biggest problem is that both good and bad bots may share traits at some point, leading to the classification of good bot traffic as malicious and forbidden. 

Bot traffic is a significant contributor to digital ad fraud, the cost of which will to increase from $35 billion in 2018 to $100 billion in 2023.

Now, what is this bot traffic, and how can you detect it? This article will guide you to know how to detect them and what they are.

What Is Bot Traffic?

Bot traffic is traffic that which can come from both organic and sponsored sources, it is generally non-human traffic that visits a website or an app.

Bot traffic is automatically sent to quality websites to seem like the actual target audience. Some of these bots carry out repetitive actions such as duplicating, clicking on ads, leaving comments, or any other activity that might be considered malicious.

The websites, adverts, and campaigns of your ads may not perform as you expect due to visits from bots. No matter how big, well-known, or new your website is, a certain number of bots will visit it at some point.

However, bot traffic makes up over 29% of all website traffic, and PPC costs from such traffic in 2021 would total 41 billion dollars, according to Fossbytes.

To secure your website and consumers’ safety, you must protect your advertisements and websites from harmful bot traffic. As a publisher and marketer, you must be aware of bot traffic because it affects your campaigns.

Five Ways To Detect Bot Traffic

As a marketer, you need to learn how to detect bot traffic; bot traffic can destroy your business if you are unaware of it.

Here are five ways to detect bot traffic:

Abnormally High Bounce Rates

Bounce rates fluctuate because they show how many visitors arrive at a website’s page and leave without viewing or clicking any content. If your bounce rate suddenly or sharply increases, it is likely that bots are targeting one page on your website. Either by a single lousy bot visiting often or by a large number of bad bots working together.

A Reduction In Website Loading Speed

A significant decrease in page load speed, especially if you have not made any major modifications to your website, can indicate malicious bot traffic.

Although, bot activity is not the only probable cause of sluggish site performance, but it is a common cause of slow load speed. When this is the case, It indicates that your website is swamped with malicious bots, and you ought to examine your other KPIs more closely.

A single bot is highly unlikely to have a substantial influence on the overall performance of your site, however, many malicious operations can, as they entail a large number of bots accessing a website at the same time.

Exceedingly Long or Very Short Session Duration

Session length is a measure that consistently reflects human behavior in terms of how long people spend on a website. However, a sudden and unexpected rise or decline in this measure might indicate the presence of bots that are crawling and surfing your website extremely slowly, clicking through your sites considerably faster than typical users, or imitating regular users.

Questionable Conversions

You may find questionable conversions by looking for a rise in fraudulent conversions. Such fraudulent conversions may gotten by form-filling or spam bots, and they may take the shape of an increase in accounts beingFive Ways To Detect Bot Traffic

Today, bots are incredibly important in the digital world. With more than 50% of internet traffic being automated, bots and crawlers play a vital role in the worldwide online environment.

These bots are everywhere on the internet performing the tasks for which they were created. There are, however, both good and bad bots. Good bots are used to deliver your search results, automate repetitive tasks, offer automated customer support, and help you via chatbots. 

While bad bots spread viruses and malware, account takeovers and brute force attacks, also lead to click fraud and ad fraud.

However, Bad bots are becoming more intelligent and are more likely to go unnoticed in the current digital world leading to cybercrime accounting for more than $1 trillion in lost revenue each year, with ad fraud and click fraud being the main causes.

Also, To increase the revenue for ad clicks and create fake traffic, bots may be employed to click on your advertising automatically from shady websites.

However, The biggest problem is that both good and bad bots may share traits at some point, leading to the classification of good bot traffic as malicious and forbidden. This is because bot traffic is a significant contributor to digital ad fraud, the cost of which is expected to increase from $35 billion in 2018 to $100 billion in 2023.

Now, what is this bot traffic and how can you detect it? This article will guide you to not only know how to detect them but also what they are.

What Is Bot Traffic?

Bot traffic, is that traffic which can come from both organic and sponsored sources, it is generally a non-human traffic that visits a website or an app.

Bot traffic is automatically sent to top-quality websites to seem like the real target audience. Some of these bots carry out repetitive actions such as duplicating, clicking on ads, leaving comments, or any other action that might be considered malicious.

The websites, adverts, and campaigns of your ads may not be performing as you had planned due to visits from bots. No matter how big, well-known, or new your website is, a certain amount of bots will visit it at some point in time.

However, bot traffic makes up over 29% of all website traffic, and PPC costs from such traffic in 2021 would total 41 billion dollars according to Fossbytes.

To secure your website and consumers’ safety, you must protect your advertisements and websites from harmful bot traffic. As a publisher and marketer, you must be aware of such bot traffic because it affects your campaigns.

Five Ways To Detect Bot Traffic

As a marketer, you need to learn how to detect bot traffic, bot traffic can destroy your business if you are not aware of it.

Here are five ways to detect bot traffic:

Abnormally High Bounce Rates

Bounce rates fluctuate because they show how many visitors arrive at a website’s page and leave without viewing or clicking any content. If your bounce rate suddenly or sharply increases, it is probable that one page on your website is being targeted by bots or that one page is the target of malicious bots either by a single bad bot visiting often or by a large number of bad bots working together.

A Reduction In Website Loading Speed

A significant decrease in page load speed, particularly if you have not made any major modifications to your website, is an indication of malicious bot traffic.

However bot activity is not the only probable cause of sluggish site performance, it is one of them (as there might also be some other technical on-page issues that might cause this).  It indicates that your website has been swamped with malicious bots and you ought to examine your other KPIs more closely.

However, a single bot is highly unlikely to have a substantial influence on the overall performance of your site; many malicious operations entail a large number of bots accessing a website at the same time.

Exceedingly Long or Very Short Session Duration

Session length is a measure that consistently reflects human behavior in terms of how long people spend on a website. However, a sudden and unexpected rise or decline in this measure might indicate the presence of bots that are either crawling and surfing your website extremely slowly, clicking through your sites considerably faster than typical users would, or imitating regular users.

Questionable Conversions

Questionable conversions might be found by looking for a rise in fraudulent conversions. Such fraudulent conversions may be brought on by form-filling or spam bots, and they may take the shape of a rise in accounts being created with ridiculous usernames and email addresses, or the filling out of contact forms with a phony name, phone number, or location.

Abnormally Rise In Traffic From Unexpected Regions 

Another common sign of bot traffic is a significant increase in the number of visitors from a single geographic area, especially one where it is doubtful that many individuals speak or understand the language the site is written in.

How To Prevent Bot Traffic

Examine Plugins and Scripts From Third Parties

As a publisher who makes use of a range of scripts, extensions, and plugins from third parties to enhance the operation of your website and handle analytics and advertising.

The exploitation of resources given by dishonest developers for ad fraud and user data collection by hostile bots is possible. Before utilizing the code, take caution to confirm that it is only being used for the intended purpose.

Include An Ads.txt File

One of the first steps to preventing or regulating bot traffic to a website is to make sure you have an ads.txt file in place to expressly state the ad networks, exchanges, and SSPs who are permitted to re-sell your content. As the ads.txt file contains guidelines for bots browsing the page, it may be set up to completely stop bots from accessing or engaging with a website.

Furthermore, alongside keeping ads.txt according to industry best practices, a verified Sellers.json file, which enables advertisers to confirm the origin of the content and engagements they are acquiring should also be hosted by your marketing partners.

User Feedback

Ad injections and forced redirection performed by bots are two examples of ad fraud that may be challenging for you as a site owner to spot but are quite obvious to visitors. Stopping bots from messing with your advertisements will be made easier if you give customers a straightforward way to provide feedback on the page and ad experiences on your website. 

Bot Traffic Blockers

You can still adopt the practice of blocking IP addresses that are obvious sources of harmful bots by deploying bot traffic blockers that will shut out such bots, IP addresses not affiliated with real people performing legitimate research, even though today’s bots are becoming more intelligent and frequently use a large number of different IP addresses, making IP-based security largely useless.

However, you must proceed with the utmost caution when limiting public IP addresses because there is a chance that you may also ban reliable individuals.

Conclusion

Updating information about bot traffic is very important, bots today are getting smarter and they often go unnoticed when performing their activities.

When you analyze your website analytics, malicious bots might not be obvious since they pose as normal human traffic. However,  Your company activities might suffer as a result when you lack the appropriate information.

At some point, You could observe irrational increases in traffic without realizing why or knowing the sources of such traffic. Or perhaps you are curious as to why you get so many views and visitors but no sales.

Nonetheless, by using the five bot traffic detection methods mentioned above, you should be able to protect your ads and PPC campaigns and also protect your customers.