What is Bot Traffic? How to Detect and Prevent?
Do you know! what is bot traffic? It is a non- human generated traffic that are specifically sent by the robots to the apps and the website. These kinds of traffic are programmed to perform various kinds of tasks like monitoring the website performance, introducing web pages on the search engine or be it the engagement in the other malicious activity. Talking about the latest statistics the overall growth of traffic as compared to 2018 is 24% and there are several tips to detect and prevent it.
For the bot traffic detection there are various tools that might mitigate such as behavioural analysis, traffic analysis tools, rate limiting, bot detection services, captcha and other bot Management Solutions. Magic bid helps in the detection of bot networks that generate click impressions from non-human sources.
What is Bot Traffic?
It is a non-human traffic that is generated by the robots to the app and websites. This kind of traffic usually come up with a negative association.
The Good Bot Traffic:
- The good bot scans the content of your website. It is usually the webcrawler which is also known as the Google bot.
- The search engine bot allows the indexing of the content on your website.
The Bad Bot Traffic:
- These kinds of bots are provided when spammy content pops up using some malicious link.
- These affect the site and make it accessible to the user.
- These are the click bots that takes the click on the ads.
How to Detect Bot Traffic
By the help of Google Analytics or any other analytics tool you can clearly analyse the traffic coming to your website and If in case the site is experiencing a bot traffic the report will clearly show about it.
The Easiest Way: How to Filter and detect Bot Traffic on Google Analytics
It is very crucial to filter the bot traffic as it helps to improve the accuracy of the website and also enhances the automated visit. Let us look at the setup data that shows how to identify and filter bot traffic on Google Analytics:
- Log In to your Google Analytics account
- Select the section ‘Acquisition’ then go to ‘All traffic’ and then choose channels.
- Filter out the traffic then. Scroll it down and look for the channels from where the traffic either direct, referral or organic comes from.
- If there is an unexpected increase in traffic you can surely get a look of it.
- Click on every channel and see the URL source from where the traffic is coming from.
Therefore, this traffic can be one of the many ways to understand if your site is actually affected by the bot and if yes from what source these traffic are coming.
How to Remove Bot Traffic from Google Analytics?
It sounds crucial to remove bot traffic from your website but you shouldn’t think that removing bot traffic will shift you in a safe zone from the effect of any kind of invalid traffic. Let us learn the removal of bot traffic from Google Analytics, first login to the Google Analytics account, and from the admin section click on view settings. The magic shield by magic tag comes as a powerful solution for the app owner to easily detect and block unwanted traffic.
Find out the boat filtering and then tick it. By pressing save you will be able to keep the boat traffic out of your Google analytic report.
3 Tips to Avoid Bot Traffic
- Use reCaptcha: This function acts as a Firewall for the protection of your bot attack. It is an advanced technology that filters the bot traffic like any other.
- robots.txt file: This helps in blocking the traffic related to bot as it crawls through the site. The overloading of traffic can be avoided through this as it clearly segregates between the good bots, spam ones and the search engine bot.
- Use Bot Mitigation: This bot mitigation solution is used by many companies. It is a machine learning process spread across the internet that understands the traffic source and differentiate between the several bots.
Conclusion
In case if your site experiences an anomalous bot traffic, make sure that you have done the job of investigating and understanding what bot traffic actually looks like and from where the source is. The fraudulent activity can also be avoided and also make sure that it should not be performed in future. MagicShield not only investigates the ad fraud it also detects the source of the traffic but also enables a strong supply chain protecting it from the bot and the low quality traffic.