Be Aware of Bot Traffic, & How To Identify It

byCdelahoz

1.1K followers

4 years ago

Today I want to talk about bot traffic. For those who don't know what this means, it is when you attract visitors to your site that are not real people.

They are robots that will not buy or be interested in the products that you are promoting.

However, when they come to your page, you will still be notified that you had a visitor, even though there was no engagement.

I saw a member here post the other day about how he was unsure if he was receiving bot traffic or not, but he found out that he was.

I recently have as well. This is a subject that really irritates me because I hate it, but it needs to be discussed.

Unlike Google, Bing, and Facebook where there are certain filters to make sure you are getting real clicks, there are many people selling clicks that are not real.

Many scam artist use bot traffic, in order to take your money and not provide real results. You normally get this from buying cheap traffic.

I support trying out other traffic sources besides the search engines and social media, because they can become very expensive.

However, there is a risk involved in this. I only spend maybe 10 dollars or so on these little experiments trying to find a diamond in the dirt, or something that will convert well for cheap.

One time I bought 5,000 clicks for $20, with not even 1 free sign up.

Now even if you're landing page or WA review is not perfect, WA is a great offer, so to not have at least 1 free sign up with 5,000 clicks, lets you know it's not you, it's the traffic source.

In my testing, I have bought cheap traffic, some were bots, some were just low quality and obviously not targeted traffic.

But I want to focus on bot traffic today.

Google Search Console is great to check out our organic traffic stats, but we also need to utilize Google Analytics, where we can see all our traffic results.

This is how you can Identify robot traffic.

1. Go to your Google Analytics account
2. Click on Acquisition tab in the left hand column to view its drop down box
3. Click on Overview
4. Scroll down under the pie graph and click Referrals
5. There are your stats

The main 3 factors I want you to look at is:

• The Number of Sessions (57)
• The Bounce Rate (100.00%)
• The Avg. Session Duration (00:00:00)

As you can see, I invested in a solo ad company called 10DollarSoloAds that offered cheap traffic (2,000 emails sent for $10).

I want you to look at the sessions, which is how many times your page was visited from this source. Mine was 57 so far.

The Real Red Flags Are The Bounce Rate & Avg. Session Duration

The bounce rate is percentage of how many people come to your site and don't navigate or stick around long.

The Avg. Session Duration is how long the visitor was on your website.

As we can see, a 100% Bounce Rate, and a 00:00:00 Avg. Session Duration is a sure sign of bot traffic.

This means that ALL 57 visitors ALL left my website without even spending 2 seconds on it COMBINED.

It may be OK for one visitor, but when it's all of them, 57 in my case, there is something wrong here.

That's how you identify bot traffic. Please be aware and check, and if you are paying for traffic and find out your paying for bot traffic, cancel it immediately.

I will create a training on this soon.

Thanks for reading WA!

Chris