The ultimate goal of doing business online is to reach more users. Creating maximum visibility for your website is the key business objective. Web traffic helps bring your business, product, or service to geographically dispersed audiences around the world. It also helps to acquire more users, generate additional business opportunities and give advertisers confidence to drive their strategies.
Each platform, however, has its dark side. When your online business grows, there is the unavoidable chance that almost half of your web traffic will consist of bots. Bot traffic, in simple terms, is non-human traffic that comes to your website from spiders and robots. This traffic tricks marketers into thinking they have legitimate web users coming to their website, but it is actually spam, which is usually low-quality traffic that will distort your aggregate data.
So how do you even know about the presence of bots in your web traffic? In other words, how can you ensure that your website visitors are humans and not robots?
Brands can identify bot traffic by tracking, monitoring and analyzing the following website metrics:
traffic trends
Web traffic usually grows gradually, over a period of time. This growth depends on your activities like organic marketing, paid marketing, content quality, etc. So if you see a sudden spike in traffic in a day or a week, it should automatically ring a bell that it may be non-human traffic. Such traffic drastically skews the usual graph, leading marketers to believe that they actually received a lot of traffic to their website.
Bounce Rate
A website loaded with bots will exhibit a higher bounce rate. A bounce rate of less than 50% and between 20% and 25% is considered acceptable and healthy, depending on the nature of your business. Similarly, there are scenarios where bounce rates also drop to impractical lows, such as 10%, or rise to impractical highs, such as 95%, which could indicate suspicious bot activity on your website.
traffic source
Traffic primarily comes from three main varieties of channels or sources: organic, direct, and referral. During a bot attack, the influx of traffic will mostly come from direct sources. Healthy, human-driven traffic typically comes from organic and referral sources, like social media and search engines, respectively, where you maximize efforts.
Page views
These are simple and easy to spot. You can be sure that bots have attacked your website if you see a large number of visits from a single IP in a very short period of time. These bots will usually flood your website at regular and repeated intervals, showing an unnatural bias in your regular traffic hits graph.
Unexpected geographic locations
Even though visitors to your website are geographically dispersed, you can still intelligently identify bots if your target audience is nowhere near your business location. If you have customers regularly visiting your website from location ‘x’ and suddenly there is a wave of customers coming from location ‘y’, that could be a sign of bot traffic.
There are many tools available online to detect and filter such bots and prevent them from returning to your website. A daily or weekly check of your website is recommended to monitor and curb bot traffic.