However, these metrics are entirely fake, leading marketers to believe that their campaigns are successful when, in reality, they are being sabotaged by bots. By doing so, it provides the illusion of an increased number of visitors to the site, boosting metrics like pageviews, clicks, and even conversion rates. What are Traffic Bots?Īt its core, a traffic bot is a program application designed to mimic human traffic, generating non-human traffic to a website. In this article, we’re going to talk about what exactly traffic bots are, how to identify them, and how to prevent them from impacting your PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ad campaigns. These bots, which simulate human behavior and generate fake clicks and views on ads, can quickly deplete advertising budgets, harm campaign performance, and negatively impact a business’s bottom line. However, with the rise of traffic bots, achieving these goals has become increasingly challenging. But if they don’t, you can create a custom filter in the GA reporting screen to remove visits to this particular page.In the world of digital marketing, the success of an advertising campaign depends on driving traffic to a website, increasing conversion rates, and ultimately, boosting sales. Google Analytics will probably find a way to block these guys. They’re showing that their product works, without actually harming anyone – except of Google Analytics’ credibility of course! What Can you Do About it? Not to mention that they’re sending this spam to potential customers, and they don’t want to DDoS their sites and piss them off! In fact, it’s orders of magnitude cheaper to do this instead of sending actually traffic to people’s websites. This shouldn’t be resource intensive at all. If I had to guess, I would say that the spammers are scraping your Google Analytics ID and using the GA code to execute the JavaScript and create fake traffic. Though it’s clear they wouldn’t mind being kicked off Google’s SERPS since they’re achieving their publicity through Google Analytics instead. So I guess their strategy is working?Įxcept I hope that Google doesn’t look too kindly on this kind of manipulation and penalizes them heavily. They’re hoping that people will write about it (like this article!), and retweet the problem (like Google’s John Mueller did). Their entire strategy is to spam thousands of websites with fake traffic to a fake page, so that it generates a lot of buzz. And yet Google Analytics was showing that it existed! And apparently, I wasn’t the only one. There was no real traffic my site to a non-existent page called “trafficbot.live”. The only 404s I got were from my own IP address when I checked to see if my site was hacked and if such a page actually existed. Even more surprising, my server registered no “404” pages that I would expect when someone tried to visit a non-existent page on my site. To my surprise, both of them showed nothing unusual! No spike in traffic of this magnitude that would explain the huge numbers I was seeing in Google Analytics. I accessed both my raw server logs, as well as the analytics on Cloudflare. Analysis: The Traffic Doesn’t Really Exist! I was surprised however, that my in-built firewall protections didn’t disable them before the count got so high. I have a number of tools to deal with these. Apparently, some bot is recording a non-existent page on my site “/trafficbot.live”.
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