What is Bot Traffic?

This is any activity conducted on the internet that is not performed by a human. Users save time performing manual tasks when they buy bot traffic, computer programs or automated scripts. Online bots were created to perform a wide range of functions by mimicking human behavior. Despite the negative connotation, not every online bot is malicious. Search engine bots are good bots because they crawl websites to provide Google, Yahoo and Bing with important information. 

You can use monitoring bots to help ensure your website is running smoothly and remains healthy. SEO crawler bots compare websites to help you improve your SEO ranking using visibility and data. Unfortunately, bad bots can cause substantial damage to your website by performing malicious tasks. Web scraper bots search your website for information often re-posted as original content. Understanding how to stop bot traffic on websites is critical for the health of your site. 

FACT: Most estimates say that bots account for approximately 50% of all internet traffic and are delivered by a variety of sources. 

Identifying Bot Traffic

You can identify this kind of traffic by looking directly at the network requests received by your website. You can also use tools created for integrated web analytics such as Google Analytics. If you see any of the anomalies listed below, there is a good chance bots are present on your website. 

Unusually High Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate shows you how many consumers have visited a single page on your website, then left before clicking on anything. If your bounce rate is unusually high, it is a good indication bots are being directed to a specific page on your site. There are ways to track your bounce rate on Google Analytics and other tools. For example, here is a high bounce rate that was seen on Google Analytics:

(Image Credit: Crazy Egg)

Unusually High Page Views

If your website has a sudden, unexpected and unprecedented spike in page views, bots are most likely clicking throughout your site. 

Junk Conversions

When you have a surge in fraudulent-appearing conversions, you might have spam bots filling out forms on your website. This is when fake names, email addresses and phone numbers are used to fill out and submit contact forms on your site. 

Unusually Low or High Session Duration

Session duration is the length of time your users generally remain on your website. The time period should remain fairly steady. If you see an unusually high session duration, bots might be browsing your website extremely slowly. If you notice an unusual drop in duration, bots might be clicking through your pages much quicker than humans would. 

Traffic Spikes from Unexpected Locations

Sudden spikes in traffic from a specific region is often an indication of a bot. Look for areas where most people are not fluent in the native language of your website. 

Good Web Bots

Not every bot is bad and several are capable of helping your website. The most common good bots are detailed below. 

Search Engine Bots

The most obvious type of good bot is a search engine bot. These online bots crawl your website pages to help your site become listed on search engines including Bing, Yahoo and Google. The requests are generally automated but are good for your website. 

SEO Crawlers

Getting your website to number one is incredibly difficult. Search engines need information to rank your site. There is SEO crawling software capable of crawling the websites of your competitors to help with your SEO and determine your ranking. This data is used by webmasters to improve organic web traffic and search visibility. For example:

(Image Credit: Screaming Frog)

Monitoring Bots

Your website needs to be online as much as possible and remain healthy. This is most likely one of your priorities. There is a wide selection of bots to monitor your site and make certain your website is always accessible. Your site will automatically receive a ping to make certain it is still online. If your website should go offline or break, you will be notified immediately so you can fix the issue. 

Copyright Bots

One of the biggest challenges is making certain your images are not stolen and used for another site. The best option to check the vast number of websites is using an automated bot. This enables you to crawl the web to scan for specific images to make certain your copyrighted content is not being used illegally without your permission. 

Bad Web Bots

Bad bots are the exact opposite of good bots. If allowed to roam freely, the result can be a lot of damage to your website. The most common bad bots include:

Spam Bots

If you have received either strange blog comments or emails, there is a good chance it was left by a spam bot. This type of bot leaves generated messages that usually do not make any sense on website blogs. Spam bots also generate promotional messages and fill out website contact forms. 

Web Scrapers

Web scrapers are extremely annoying online bots scraping websites for important information including contact details and email addresses. Sometimes website images and content are stolen to use for social media accounts and websites without obtaining permission. The only person who gains anything from a spam bot is the individual scraping the data. 

Fake Traffic Generator Bot

A fake traffic generator bot or tool generates a page view to any site to target the PPC ads of the user. Hundreds of clicks and views can be obtained quickly including ad and page views. Most bots will force the visitor to view the page. 

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DDoS Networks

One of the most deadly and oldest bots is a DDoS bot. This is a shortened version of distributed denial of service bot. These bots are generally installed on PCs with the intention of targeting a specific server or website to take them offline. Most people are unaware they have a DDoS bot until the damage is already done. There have been numerous reports of these bots causing major financial damage to websites because they are offline for several days. The image below explains this process visually:

(Image Credit: Medium)

Vulnerability Scanners

Initially, these bots appear to be advantageous for the server logs of your website. In truth, they are the exact opposite. There are a wide variety of malicious bots scanning millions of websites to search for vulnerabilities. The results are brought directly to the creators. A good bot informs the owner of the site. These bots are designed to report back to a specific person generally using or selling the information for hacking websites. 

Did You Know? Ad bots can also create and abandon shopping carts, steal unique content and present it as their own, fabricate fake accounts on membership sites, and generate malicious traffic to create false traffic spikes—skewing any marketing KPIs, CPC conversions, and overall ad campaign ROI. According to recent reports, ad fraud alone is set to exceed $3.3 billion. (f5.com)

How to Stop Bot Traffic on Website

You need to protect yourself because bots are found on websites every day. There are different methods and reasons for targeting each individual site. This means no single solution is available to defend your website against every type of bot. Your best option is being proactive to address the issue by taking certain steps. The recommendations below will help you prevent bot attacks. 

Blocking Known Proxy Servers and Hosting Providers

The more advanced attackers will target networks more difficult to block. The less sophisticated bots can easily access both proxy and hosting services. Blocking access for these sources often discourages potential attackers from targeting your website, mobile apps and API. 

Blocking Outdated User Browsers and Agents or CAPTCHA

Many of the scripts and tools have default configurations containing mostly outdated string lists for users. Although blocking them will not stop more experienced users, you can discourage or catch some of them. The risk for blocking outdated browsers and agents is extremely low. This is because the majority of modern browsers are forcing auto-updates. This makes it harder to navigate the web with an outdated version. 

Monitoring Failed Validation Increases for Gift Card Numbers

If you have an increase in traffic or failed validations for gift card pages, this is an indication an attempt is being made to steal the balances on your gift cards. One of the most common bots of this type is GiftGhostBot. 

Investigating Spikes in Traffic

Spikes in traffic are not advantageous for your business if there is not a specific and clear source. An unexplained source is often an indication of activity by a bad bot. For instance:

(Image Credit: Digital Davidson)

Protection All Access Points from Bad Bots

You need to make certain your exposed mobile apps and APIs are protected in addition to your website. Information regarding blocking should be shared between your systems. If you leave the backdoor to your site open, your website protection will be ineffective. 

Be Aware of All Public Data Breaches

Recently stolen credentials tend to be active. In the event of a large data breach, these credentials will be used by bad bots with increasing frequency.

Evaluating Traffic Sources

You need to carefully monitor your traffic sources for decreased conversion rates from specific sources and high bounce rates. These are often indications of bots. 

Monitoring for Failed Logins

The baseline for failed login attempts needs to be defined so you can monitor for spikes and anomalies. You can set up alerts for automatic notifications. You need to set up global thresholds since slow and low attacks will not trigger your session or user level alerts. 

Evaluating Solutions for Bot Mitigation

Every day people are working to attack websites all over the world. The strain on your resources and IT department is expensive due to the massive volume, damage and sophistication of automated bot threats. Human behavior is mimicked by bots enabling them to slip past many of the more traditional security tools. Consider an evaluation of bot mitigation services offering vigilant support and expertise within the industry for full control and visibility over abusive bot traffic. For example:

(Image Credit: AskF5)

Performance Issue with Bot Traffic

Many attackers send enormous amounts of traffic through bots for launching a DDoS attack. When massive amounts of traffic are directed at a single website, the origin server is at risk of becoming overloaded. This makes the website unavailable or slow for legitimate users. Malicious traffic from bots can financially cripple your website without impacting their performance. You are more vulnerable if you are selling products with a limited inventory. 

If your website is serving ads, fake ad clicks can be triggered when bots click on different page elements. This is referred to as click fraud. Even though your ad revenue may receive a temporary boost, advertising networks can detect bot clicks. If they suspect you are committing click fraud, action will be taken against you. You and your website can be banned from the network. This is the reason websites hosting ads are extremely careful about click fraud. 

Inventory hoarding bots will target websites with limited inventories. The bots visit eCommerce websites and load up shopping carts with vast amounts of merchandise. Legitimate shoppers are then unable to make a purchase because your merchandise is unavailable. Sometimes, the result is unnecessary restocking from your manufacturer or supplier. These types of bots will never purchase anything. They are designed to disrupt the inventory you have available. Unauthorized traffic from bots can affect your analytics including:

• Bounce rate
• User geolocation
• Session duration 
• Page views
• Conversions

These types of metrics deviations are extremely frustrating for the owner of the website. When your website is flooded with activity from bots, measuring your performance is extremely difficult. The noise resulting from the bots will cripple your attempts to improve your website such as conversion rate optimization and A/B testing. In some instances, Google Analytics may show some referral traffic coming to your site from a website bot traffic club. 

These are some of the reasons including a solution for detecting and preventing fraud is so important. Hundreds of data points can be captured for your traffic. This information can be effectively used to determine where fraudulent bots are coming from so you can block them from your website. You can detect bots and determine which users are human. You can optimize your campaigns continuously because you receive detailed analytics for your site. This ensures fraud becomes a much smaller issue. 

You then have the ability to improve the performance of your campaign. You can get past issues regarding ad fraud while taking advantage of numerous benefits including:

• Increasing your return on investment or ROI
• Improving your metrics 
• Optimizing your spend

Once you know your money is not being used by fraudsters to line their pockets you will be able to relax and improve your SEO. This means your business will be more organized and efficient with a greater potential for growth. Advertisers in every industry are being negatively impacted by ad fraud due to bots. You can protect your website by investing in protection against ad fraud. 

Bot Traffic Google Analytics

You can use Google Analytics to remove traffic from bots to help eliminate a performance issue with bot traffic. If you conduct a search on Google as to how to remove traffic from bots, you will discover a commonly recommended course of action. In most cases, the following steps are recommended. 

Step One

Go to your Admin View settings. your need to check the option for excluding all hits from known spiders and bots. For instance:

(Image Credit: Marketing Land)

Step Two

You need to identify all suspicious traffic such as outdated browsers and repeat visits. You can exclude any corresponding IP addresses by using a filter. 

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Step Three

• Go to Property >Tracking Info >Referral Exclusion list. 
• You can implement the first suggestion simply by clicking on the checkbox. 
• This will make certain all bots listed on the Spiders & Bots List of the International Advertising Bureau are excluded from your data for Google Analytics. 
• Any bot not on this list will remain undetected. 

Manual identification and exclusion for suspicious IP addresses are not nearly as reliable and far less practical. 

There can be a lot of traffic appearing as suspicious if you have a large website. Evaluating and filtering this traffic takes a lot of time. The ability of bots to imitate humans has also improved considerably. One of the most common methods is spreading a large number of bots over different IP addresses. This includes residential addresses. This does not mean you should not use the Referral Exclusion List. 

Keep in mind when using this option to exclude referral sources you will not be able to track hits from that source. You will be stripping away all referral information. These types of hits will appear as direct traffic. This could make your data worse than it was previously. The bottom line is you should not eliminate bot traffic by using the Referral Exclusion List. Your best option is selecting to exclude all hits from known spiders and bots. This solution might not be perfect but it is practical. 

Diib® Alerts You to All Negative Bot Traffic!

The above advice does help in limiting the negative bot traffic your website may get, however, software, like Diib Digital, can give you a heads up to all negative traffic to your site. Our alerts were designed to notify you when any negative action or traffic occurs on or about your website. Objectives give you solutions for repair, in plain English, which limit the amount of time necessary to restore your website. Here are some of the Diib Dashboard features you’ll love:

• Bounce rate monitoring
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