Robots may be slowly becoming part of our everyday lives, but today we are focusing on their less intimidating relatives: bots. But what is bot traffic, and how does it affect ad monetization? In this blog, we will explain how bots operate, the different types of bot traffic, and the impact they can have on publishers’ ad revenue.
What are Bots and what do they do?
A bot is a software designed and programmed to complete different tasks automatically, without any human interventions by imitating users behavior and interactions with web content. These software operates through a network where they scan content, gather information from other websites, or even interact with users.
Types of Bots
One hand there’s the “green flag” bots, such as search engines, to index content, customer service, automated bots or even bots for social engagement. But on the other side of the coin, there are the “red flag” bots, searching for important information from users to create spam content later on, violating websites Terms of Service or even your Robot.Txt. Some of the most common bots are:
Chatbots
These bots are designed to mimic human conversations to solve any possible problems, organizing tasks among other activities.
Crawlers Bots
Crawlers or web crawlers are those designed to navigate through websites and gather information to index sites, such as Google.
Monitoring Bots
Monitoring bots are software specialized bots taking care of a website health or system.
What is Bot Traffic?
Bot traffic is based on the non-human traffic that a website or an app receives. It is believed that almost 53% of internet traffic now a days are bots, and normally they are believed to be making malicious practices when in reality this mostly relays on the purpose of the bot or website owner.
How to detect bot traffic?
Bot detection refers to the different methods used to differentiate bot traffic on websites, mobile apps, or APIs from human interactions, good bots practices or malicious ones. While some bots are created for legitimate purposes, others can be pretty harmful for a website performance and generate poor traffic.
Here are some of the main signs to uncover bot traffic:
Unexplained high bounce rate
This metric reflects all of the users entering a specific page and leaving before interacting with anything on it.
Unexpected spikes in page views
As mentioned earlier, the search of bots have been increasing through the years, that is why noticing an unexpected spike on your page views is most likely the result of bots work.
Shorter session duration
Session duration measures how long users spend on a website. This metric can naturally fluctuate. Sudden or unusual drops may indicate non-human activity. Bots can sometimes interact with pages without engaging, creating shorten sessions than the real users would make disrupting engagement metrics.
Unexpected locations
A website’s audience is relatively consistent in terms of geographic distribution, for it to suffer sudden changes, especially from locations that are unlikely to create big numbers or even speak the main language of the website, can be a sign of bot traffic.
Fake conversions
An unexpected rise in conversion rates such as subscriptions, sign ups or contact forms, created with fake information can be seen as a suspicious bot interaction.
How to stop bot traffic?
Build Web Application Firewalls (WAFs)
These firewalls are designed to filter this constant traffic based on a set of rules. They simply managed identified malicious IPs, suspicious user agents, and common attack patterns. However, They are not built to manage bots, sometimes if the activity seems normal to a WAF it might bypass it.
Update Robot.txt
Robot.txt are mainly built to tell the web crawlers what parts of a website they should crawl and which ones they shouldn’t. That is why in most cases they can disallow these bots even though it is true that this is not a reinformed mechanism. These types of bot sometimes ignore the robot.txt completely going through them easily.
Honeypots
Honeypots are hidden links on the HTML that are invisible to real users but visible to bots that sarape or crawl pages. When a bot interacts with a honeypot link, it becomes easier to identify and block that traffic.
How is bot traffic affecting publisher’s revenue?
We are well aware of how chatbots are changing the way people is consuming information now-a-days. Shifting users from clicks on websites to instant responses with chat interfaces. At the same time, bot traffic is becoming increasingly difficult to identify. Recent reports estimate that bots now account for 53% of all web traffic, while human activity has fallen to 47%. But the real question here is, how is this bot traffic affecting publisher´s revenue?
Distorted Analytics
Publisher’s main source of information when understanding user behavior, performance and measure content performance, are based on analytics. When these bots distort metrics such as, engagement, pageviews, and sessions, it becomes difficult to make smart data-driven decisions. Leading to poor audience segmentation, wrong strategy decisions, or inaccurate traffic reports. Advertisers prioritize verified human impressions, making traffic verification essential for publishers to protect their CPMs and maintain inventory quality.
Yield performance
Publishers monetization decisions are based on users behavior and traffic data. The contamination of bot traffic on these metrics can create artificial results on an specific location on a website. This can lead to inefficient inventory allocation and pricing decisions, as publishers may optimize their strategies based on misleading data rather than genuine user activity on performance metrics.
Content Scraping
Content scarping bots are designed to replicate website content including images, articles and the different assets a website can produce within minutes.
Creating many difficulties for publishers like: duplicating content, damaging SEO strategies and the use of unauthorize intellectual property. As a result, the value of original content can get weaker and publishers could struggle to maintain their visibility online.
Inventory Value
Publisher´s inventory relay on impressions generated by real users. When a big portion of that inventory is generate by bot traffic, it can negatively impact revenue. Advertisers might view the inventory as low quality making them reduce their bids, reducing CPMs and monetization opportunities.
At the end of the the day real numbers are what matter, so it is safe to say that the appearance of bot traffic is damaging for publisher’s revenue. While these bots inflate preforming metrics, reduce inventory´s quality and impact yield optimization, advertisers continue to prioritize transparency and traffic quality. Publishers that fail to prove invalid traffic, risk to reduce advertisers’ trust and weaken overall revenue performance. It becomes essential to protect publisher’s inventory in order to maintain monetization and maximize revenue.
Are bots really that bad?
As we have seen, not all bots are harmful. While many bots help power the internet, malicious bot traffic can distort your analytics, impact user experience, and ultimately affect your ad revenue.
If you’re unsure whether bot traffic is affecting your website, our team is always ready to answer your questions and check for any suspicious activity!
