Google Analytics is in a state of fizzy. For the past few weeks, it has been showing some cluttered and inflated statistics on the pages of many users. Now, people from the industry are assuming it to be the bots of countries like Czechia and Seychelles.
Even our Digital Marketing Consultant at Propel Guru have noticed the same increase in the spam website traffic that is coming in. Many website owners are reporting the issue, so we decided to give it a look and delve into the matter.
Keeping the track of the web traffic is important and we need to work out how can we repair it.
If people would see more traffic than usual, that too all of a sudden, could send anyone into a state of panic. However, growing traffic can be a winning deal for any business, but not when the unusual growing traffic is spam.
So, what is bot traffic?
Is it harmful to have bot traffic on your website? if yes? why?
So, simply put, Bot traffic is unusual or non-human traffic coming to the website from any third-party application. This type of traffic is usually considered a negative one as it carries a negative connotation. However, to break the ice, bot traffic is not the real traffic, it’s just spam.
Although bot traffic should not always have to be good or bad, it all depends on the purpose of the bots.
In 2021, Bot traffic made up 42.3% of all internet activity two percent higher than that of in 2020, 40.8%, reports say.
Out of this total of 42.3%, bad bot traffic was nearly double the “good bots” that perform mostly legitimate functions such as indexing and response automation
So, is Bad bot traffic actually bad for your website?
Now, here’s a catch. According to a study published in RocketFuel, the website bounce rate between 26-40% is considered excellent, and 41-55% average. However, the latest Czech Republic and Seychelles bot traffic regined websites show a bounce rate of 99%, with low pages per session and a session period of just one or two seconds.
The bots, generally are programmed to run automated tasks over the internet. They collect the data and carry out non-human roles like crawling and indexing.
It’s important to understand that the bots are designed to perform the same task multiple times. Obviously, the creator of the bot intends to fasten the speed of the task and do it quickly, as quick as possible, and this obviously can cause a lot of unwanted issues to your website.
The unusual bot traffic can destroy your business if it remains unfiltered and unmanaged.
The eCom sites and the bots can destroy the data of analyzing the actual sales. The eCom sites sometimes have limited inventory. These bots can hoard the inventory and fill the cart with merchandise, making it unavailable for genuine customers who intend to purchase.
Now for sites that run ads mostly, this bot traffic can land on the site and click on the various page elements that can trigger fake ad clicks. This can increase the ad revenue at first, but once the online advertising networks detect the fraud, it may result in the site being banned.
What is a safe escape?
Cloudflare Location Exclusion
The first and the finest way to get rid of the bot traffic is to have Cloudflare Location Exclusion.
Doing this will stop any bot traffic coming from Czechia and Seychelles from showing up in your Google analytics dashboard.
However, if your website relies on genuine traffic from these two locations, then using this option will not be a fair game as using Cloudflare location exclusion will block all the genuine traffic from accessing your website.
Here are the easy steps to achieve that.
Step 1: Login to Cloudflare (sign up for an account and configure first if you do not have an active account).
Step 2: Go to security and select “WAF”
Step 3: Create a firewall rule in the web application firewall section
Step 4: Name the countries that you want to exclude – in this example, that means Czechia and Seychelles.
Step 5: Under “then action” select managed challenge
Step 6: Deploy the firewall rule across your website
Google Analytics
The alternative is to use the location filter in Google Analytics; this will exclude traffic from other countries. However, doing this will not help you prevent the traffic that is accessing your website but can exclude them from the analytics view for sure, enabling you to get the exact report of what is happening on your website.
Here is a quick way of excluding traffic from the specific countries in your google analytics view.
Step 1 is to Go to the admin setting, going to the view setting and then adding filters.
Eg: Admin Settings > View Settings > Filters
Step 2 is to select the custom under the filter type.
Step 3 is selecting “Exclude” in the filter type
Step 4 is to select “Country” in the dropdown menu
Step 5 is to enter the country/countries that you want to remove in the field.
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Ajay Dubedi
CEO & Founder
15+ years leading business operations and client management in the segments of digital marketing and CRM. Driven by test-driven development paradigms, and exceedingly collaborative across all disciplines (from stakeholders to product to design to development to users – and back again).
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