Your website is a lot of things to you. It’s a representation of your business or brand, it’s how you interact with and serve your customers, and it’s how you generate income. But your website is also vulnerable to some very real threats that are out there. We’re talking about bots – the malicious kind that can hurt your site, your reputation, and your profits.
All websites see some level of traffic. Some of the traffic is from people, and some of it is from bots. There are some types of bot traffic that are alright and even beneficial. But the kind of bot traffic you want to be able to detect right away and block before it can do any damage is bad bot traffic. It’s the kind that comes from scammers and ad fraudsters and it’s never productive. Keep reading to learn more about identifying bots on your site website and what you can do to block harmful bots.
Look for Clues
Fraudulent bot traffic may not always be evident at first, but there are always clues you can look for if you think you have bad bots coming to your site. Bad bot clues can be found in new and irregular data patterns, such as:
- Locations: Notice where many of your views and transactions are occurring. Consider where you’re geo-targeting any ads. A shift in where a large number of your site views are coming from, especially if it’s from country you don’t do much business in, can be a sign of bots in action.
- Page views: A rapid spike in page views could be attributed to fraudulent bot activity – even more so if those page views last for less than a second.
- Bounce rates: Bots are made to perform an activity to reach a goal. They will try to perform this activity and do so very quickly. A high and fast bounce rate on your website may be due to bots trying and failing or to perform that activity.
- Conversions: A high percentage of junk conversions is one more bad bot clue to be on the lookout for. Every so often an email will bounce back or a shopper will leave an item in their cart without checking out. That’s expected. But if these types of transactions – conversions that don’t really convert – seem to be all you’re seeing lately, your new traffic may be made up of bad bots.
Don’t Rely on Old Bot-Protection Methods
Many sites will rely on captchas and firewalls to prevent bot infiltration. Today’s bots, however, are more advanced and some of them can get around captchas and firewalls. Fraudulent bot activity that is known and has already been flagged may be prevented from interfering with your site, but these preventative measures may not be able to detect instances of new and different bot activity.
Beware of Ad Fraud Schemes
Some online marketers may rely on fraudulent methods to increase traffic and inflate conversion rates. They may promise you growth and leave out the fact that they’re using bots to make it look like their ads were successful. By the time you catch on, they’re long gone, and you’ve wasted time and money. Being able to vet marketers and be aware of fraudulent bot activity on your site as soon as it happens is invaluable.
Get a Bot-Detection and Prevention Solution
Your website will see human traffic and bot traffic. You’ll want to be able to tell the difference. That’s what we at Fraudlogix are here to help you do. Our bot-detection and prevention solutions help marketers differentiate between bot traffic and human traffic and keep harmful bots away from a website. Learn more about our fraud protection solutions and bot blocklists or contact us today to start defending your website from bot traffic.
