Internet Security Tips

What is bot-driven traffic and how can we avoid it? The traffic on the ads and web pages that is from non-human sources refers to bot traffic. Such type of traffic usually belongs to software apps meant for running automated and repetitive tasks that are known as bots.

Bots are not good for website owners, advertisers and publishers as the performance of the website is directly impacted by the amount of traffic a page receives. If the traffic is not authentic and real, then it would not account for revenue generation.

Did you know that bot account for half of the web traffic?

How can you detect bot traffic?

Here are some key metrics, measurement, and analysis of which would indicate bot traffic:

• Bounce Rate – A bot will typically not be keen on exploring the site thoroughly, so a high bounce rate can be linked with high bot traffic.
• Average session duration – Usually, a bot will just click on a site and then leave it quickly. So typically if the average session duration of users is not more than 2 seconds, then it becomes highly indicative that it’s bots who are visiting your website.
• Page Views – As per general human behavior, a user might visit a maximum of 5-6 pages on your site and then move on. On the other hand, if you happen to notice 50-60 page views all of a sudden at a particular point in time, then, it indicates that bots are visiting your site.
• Page loads slowly – It’s a fact that when a website receives huge traffic, then the site loading speed automatically reduces. However, if this is a sudden occurrence and happens out of no reason, then it might indicate that your site is receiving an unprecedented bot traffic or is even being subjected to a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack.

Here is what you can do to avoid bot traffic:

• You can use a robots.txt file to offer specific guidelines for the bots visiting your website about what they can do or can not do on your site. Without a robots.txt file, any bot can visit your website and interrupt with your site’s performance.
• Employing the CDN service (Content Delivery Network). It can offer effective protection against DDoS attacks and prevent malicious bots from crawling over your website. Some useful CDN services are:
• Cloudflare
• Akamai
• AWS
• You can also opt for anti-bot solutions to gain some protection against bot activity on your site.
• Last but not the least, you can manually block IPs which are related to bot traffic.

Now that you know what is bot-driven traffic and how can you avoid it, save yourself from bot traffic with the above-suggested methods.