What is Bot Traffic and How can it Affect your Website Performance?

 A recent report states that more than 42% of online traffic comes from non-human sources. Furthermore, all this traffic contains various programs ranging from legitimate crawlers and bots to corrupt automated software and programs.

What is Bot Traffic?

Bot traffic is traffic to a website from non-human sources. While the term usually carries a negative connotation with it, bot traffic is not a bad thing if the bots have a good purpose.

There are many bots that have become an essential element of services such as search engines such as Google (Googlebot) and even digital assistants such as Alexa and Siri. Many companies have welcomed these bots on their sites.

On the other hand, there are also malicious programs that generate bot traffic. These bots are commonly used for nefarious purposes such as data scraping, credential stuffing, DDoS attacks, and more. Even low-level bad bots can cause problems with website analysis and help hackers commit click fraud.

Types of Bot Traffic.

1. Good Bots

Good bots are one of the most important factors for website performance. A good example of good bots is search engine bots or crawlers. Their purpose is to crawl websites and index content to show users relevant search terms. Other examples of good bots are partner/vendor bots and digital assistant bots.

2. Commercial bot

Commercial bots are operated by companies for the purpose of exploiting online content as well as collecting data from consumers and websites. These bots are honest about their identity and can prove to be beneficial for businesses in collecting data. However, commercial bot traffic can markedly reduce your website performance by taking up a lot of resources on your server.

3. Bad bots

Bad bots don't follow any rules for robots.txt files and try to hide their origin and identity in order to simulate human traffic. The main reason bad bots differ from good bots is that they have bad intentions. They are tasked with malicious purposes to disrupt or destroy functions on a website. If left unchecked, these bots can cause permanent damage to websites. Some of the most common types of bad bots are spam bots, credential stuffing bots, web data scraping bots, DoS bots, ad fraud bots, and gift card fraud bots.

How is bot traffic identified?

Managing bot traffic is no easy task, and identifying it is one of the most important elements in properly assessing your site's analytics. Here are some things to look for that can help you identify bot traffic:

·        A sudden increase in bounce rates and traffic – both these things happening at the same time is a clear sign of bad bot traffic on your website. This could mean either too many bad bots are visiting your site, or one bad bot is visiting your site too often.

·        A sudden drop in page load speed – If you haven't updated your website or made any major changes and are seeing a dramatic drop in your page load speed, this is a sign that bots are bad on your website. being attacked by. However, you should also take a look at some other KPIs of your website as there could be some other technical on-page issues that could be the reason.

·        A dramatic decrease in bounce rates – If your bounce rate suddenly becomes very low, this is a strong indicator that bad bots such as web scraping bots are flooding your website and stealing content. This usually happens when these bots are scanning a large number of web pages on your site.

How can bot traffic hurt analytics?

Unauthorized traffic generated by bots can severely impact metrics such as bounce rates, conversions, page views, users' geolocations, session duration, and more in analytics. This effect can make it difficult for site owners to accurately measure their website's performance. It can also impact various analytics activities such as A/B testing, on-page SEO improvements, and conversion rate optimization. Statistical noise and interference in the data can paralyze these activities, and make it difficult for site owners to efficiently improve their website performance.

How to filter bot traffic with Google Analytics?

Google Analytics offers a few options to help filter out bot traffic. For example, selecting the "Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders" feature will exclude bots from view in analytics reports. And if you can identify the source of the bit traffic, you can provide Google Analytics with a list of IPs to ignore for site visits. While this will not prevent bots from visiting your website, it will help you filter out bot traffic and check for genuine organic traffic to your website.

How can bot traffic affect performance?

One of the most common methods for hackers and attackers to launch DDoS attacks on websites is by sending massive amounts of bot traffic. The massive amount of bot traffic can cause the origin server to become overloaded, which can significantly slow down the website or make it inaccessible to legitimate users.

Conclusion- It is clear that bot traffic can have a major impact on the performance of a website. While some of this traffic may be beneficial, much of it is malicious and can lead to poor user experiences, security vulnerabilities, and decreased website performance. It is important for website owners to be aware of the potential risks associated with bot traffic and take steps to protect their sites from it. Additionally, they should regularly monitor their sites to ensure that they are not being targeted by bots and that their website performance is not being adversely affected by non-human traffic. For more information visit our website digijaguars.