How bots skew marketing analytics
Bots are infamous for skewing website analytics and platforms such as Google Analytics don’t always block this invalid traffic. Instead this bot traffic will appear in your analytics alongside legitimate traffic, when actually it is automated spam skewing your marketing data.
Have the number of new sessions to your site spiked?
An abnormally large number of new sessions alongside high bounce rate and low session duration is an indicator of automated traffic activity.
Is your average session duration below three seconds?
A recurring low session duration may not be due to the speed of your website, but crawlers scraping your site for images and content.
Is your average bounce rate high?
Whether it’s site-wide or on a selection of pages, a high bounce rate of between 95% and 100% implies the presence of bot traffic.
Has your conversion rate dropped?
A spike in new sessions without an increase in conversions will reduce your overall conversion rate.
Has direct and referral traffic increased?
These two channels are common sources of bot traffic and where you are likely to see the highest spikes in traffic.
What is the impact of Skewed Marketing Analytics?
Data is the oil of modern business. More and more decisions and strategies are driven by the insights gained from gathered data. This is particularly true in digital marketing.
The success or failure of website changes and marketing, content, pricing and product strategies is determined by website analytics.
Small investments are made, strategies implemented, and results gathered via analytics before more money can be invested. If this data is inaccurate, the decisions the data informs could be fundamentally wrong.
How to prevent Skewed Marketing Analytics
The Netacea approach aims to give you visibility of all traffic on your website, while giving you control over the visitors that you allow through.
Our technology allows you to choose the bots that you want to stop hitting your site. We identify which bots have been registered within analytics packages and by analysing and accurately categorising the types of traffic to your site, we provide insights into how the human and bot traffic is behaving on your site.
Netacea’s Intent Analytics™ Engine uses advanced machine learning techniques to detect Account Takeover attempts by spotting patterns of behaviour that indicate suspicious behaviour. This includes spotting indicators of an upcoming attack, such as large amounts of fake account creations that can be used to camouflage an Account Takeover, as well as the attack itself.
By implementing Netacea’s bot management solution, our customers have adjusted their conversion rate by up to 20% and reduced the number of unexplained spikes in user activity. Start your free trial today.