Five Ways to Identify Bot Traffic on Your Website

Online businesses should reach more people. Your website should be visible to the maximum extent possible. Web traffic is a way to promote your product or business to people not located in the same area. Web traffic can also help you acquire more customers, generate additional business opportunities, and give advertisers the confidence to improve your strategies.

Each platform has its downsides. There is a chance that nearly half of your web traffic will be bots as you grow your online business. Bot traffic is the non-human traffic that comes to your website via robots and spiders. Marketers are fooled into believing this traffic is legitimate, but it is spam traffic, generally low-quality traffic that will skew aggregated data.

How can one find out if there are bots in their web traffic? So, how do you ensure that your website visitors are not robots and humans by bot detection check?

Brands can track, monitor, and analyze the following website metrics to identify bot traffic:

Traffic Trends

Website traffic grows slowly over time. Your activities, such as organic marketing, paid to advertise, and content quality, will all affect this growth. If you notice a sudden increase in traffic within a week or a day, this should signal that the traffic is not human. This traffic can cause the graph to be distorted and lead marketers to believe they are receiving a lot of traffic to their site.

Bounce Rate

A bot-laden website will have a higher bounce rate. Depending on your business, a bounce rate between 50-60% and 20-25% is acceptable and healthy. There are also situations where bounce rates drop to untenable lows (like 10%) or rise to unpractical highs (like 95%), which could indicate bot activity on your website.

Traffic Source

Traffic comes mainly from three primary sources or channels -organic and direct. In a bot attack, traffic will mainly come from direct sources. Healthy and human-driven traffic is usually derived from organic and referral sources such as search engines and social media.

Hits on Pages

These are easy to spot. If you receive a lot of hits from one IP in a short time, bots have likely attacked your site. These bots will often flood your website at regular, repetitive intervals. This will cause a strange skew to your traffic graph.

Unexpected Geographic Locations

Visitors to your website may be geographically dispersed, but you can still identify bots intelligently even if they aren’t located near your business. Bot traffic could indicate that customers regularly visit your website from an ‘x’ area. However, if suddenly you see a surge of customers from a ‘y’ place, it could indicate that bot traffic is occurring.

Online tools are available to filter and detect bots and prevent them from returning. It is recommended to perform a weekly or daily check of your website to curb bot traffic.

The Essentials of a Bot Detection Solution

Bot detection and management solutions should be able to detect and manage all types of bots, good and bad. Bot management tools must also be capable of integrating with many different Web and application infrastructure architectures to meet the needs of their users. This solution must be tailored to each organization’s needs. It should be able to detect bot traffic in real-time and take appropriate measures, such as blocking, showing a solution feeding fake data, dropping the connection, or CAPTCHA.