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The digital platform is a great space for marketing and outreach campaigns through various means. However, over the past few years, bad bot traffic has become a growing concern for online marketers. According to many industry experts, it’s one of the biggest threats to digital advertising today.
Here are some crucial facts about bots you need to know.
What are Bots?
Bots are designed for specific purposes, such as scraping, crawling, clicking, etc. Some of them are even part of a large-scale ad fraud network. You don’t want any of these bots to interfere with your site. According to Forbes, around 60 percent of website traffic could be coming from bots.
What are the Risks?
According to White Ops, cybercriminals spend an estimated $6.3 billion on US digital advertising every year. Out of this amount, 8 to 15 percent is generated by bots.
It means that between 80 and 85 cents go towards ad fraud schemes instead of actual ad revenue for every dollar spent.
As a marketer, bots can cost you money by interfering with your ad delivery and click fraud. For publishers, bad bot traffic can lead to revenue losses from invalid impressions and non-human activity.
Bots aren’t just a problem for big publishers. They can impact small publishers and sites as well.
5 Ways to Avoid Bad Bot Traffic
The first step is to eliminate bot traffic from your campaign sources. If you’re only placing ads on a couple of platforms, then this shouldn’t be too hard.
However, if you manage ad campaigns across multiple platforms (for example, Facebook, Twitter, Google Display Network, and so on), controlling a bot from creating negative traffic can get a little more complicated.
For example, if you’re using Google Analytics, you can implement a security key, a physical authentication tool that confirms each web user’s identity.
Bandwidth Throttling
Throttling bandwidth limits the number of requests that a suspicious source can send to your site. It means you only have to block bad traffic when it happens instead of preventing it beforehand.
Some bots work by increasing their requests to a specific site over time, which means you’ll need an adaptive system in place.
For example, if you’re using Google Analytics, you can implement a security key, a physical authentication tool that confirms each web user’s identity.
Bandwidth Throttling
Throttling bandwidth limits the number of requests that a suspicious source can send to your site. It means you only have to block bad traffic when it happens instead of preventing it beforehand.
Some bots work by increasing their requests to a specific site over time, which means you’ll need an adaptive system in place.
Signature-based Detection
You can use signature-based detection to find bad bots based on how they act and behave on your site.
Although this might have problems with false positives or negatives, it does give you a good idea of who’s real and who isn’t.
Behavioural Analysis
When combined with signature-based detection, the behavioural analysis uses machine learning to analyse bot behaviour and identify the most common patterns in bad bot traffic. It also takes into account how users interact with content and each other. By doing so, it can determine if a user is real or fake.
The final step is to take action and block bad traffic. If you find that bots generate invalid impressions or clicks, you’ll need to make adjustments and ensure the problem doesn’t happen again. It includes updating your definition lists (for example, site filters) and blacklisting suspicious sources. Securing your website is crucial for your company market campaigns as they can negatively impact your efforts and result in losses of various kinds.
