What Exactly is Bot Traffic?
Bot traffic is defined as any machine driven, non-human traffic that connects to your website or app. Often “bots” are associated with all things negative, as they tend to be irritating due to their irrelevance in terms of user engagement.
However, bots aren’t necessarily good or bad. It all depends on their purpose. Some bots are designed to be useful to users. Others can be rather malignant, such as the ones designed for data scraping, launching denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, malware installation or other unauthorized web crawling.
What makes these bots such a nuisance is that they can mess with your website analytics and they typically generate click-fraud. A action which defrauds services like Google AdSense, Google Ad Manager, and the programmatic advertising world.
What Are The Different Types of Bot Traffic?
Bots make up over 40-45% of all website traffic. A machine is touching your site, instead of the desired human being. If that’s not bad enough, there are different types you need to watch out for — six different types to be specific:
1. Click bots
Click bots are the key tool used by spammers. These bots are considered the greatest threat posed to web publishers, especially those following the pay-per-click (PPC) model for their advertisements.
2. Download bots
Download bots are ban of true marketing data analytics., especially when it comes to your user engagement data. They generate fake download count. If you are offering free products or services via a form, these bots will mess up your conversion rate data.
3. Spam bots
The most common of all bots. These bots like mess with you website, by attempting to place ads in your comment fields, steal emails, and attempt to do website redirects, This can generate all sorts of negative SEO against you and your competitors. It is the fake news of the bot world.
4. Spy Bots
These bots only goal is to quietly steal information. They like to steal semi-personal information like email addresses from websites and other communicative channels, which makes them incredibly dangerous.
5. Scraper Bots
Scraper bots are massively malicious. They’re created by third-party scrapers, usually hired by your very own competitors with the intention of stealing your content, product catalogs, and even prices. Only to be repurposed and published somewhere else — without your permission, of course.
6. Imposter Bots
Impostor bots act like they’re authentic visitors to bypass any security measures you have in place. These bots are most responsible for the DDoS attacks, and they really like to install spyware on your site, or position themselves as fake search engines.
Bots are a never-ending nuisance that will eventually destroy your website if you don’t take the proper measures to spot and prevent them. Between the different types of bots you’ll have to deal with, and the fact that they’re only getting smarter, you could have a lot of work ahead of you.
Debbie Kurth
CEO & Technical Director of Multimedia Designs, LLC, System Designer, Developer, Producer with 15+ years in the internet design and development space and 25+ years in the Software Development for the entertainment industry. Winner of the prestigious International Themed Entertainment Association award for interactive design. She holds a degree in Computer Engineering & Mathematics from California State University, Long Beach.
MultiMedia Designs, LLC
Digital Design & Technology Company
Office: +1.818.272.0819
Email: multimediadesignsllc@gmail.com
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