When you need to evaluate your ad efficiency, you may use such metrics as the number of clicks and pageviews, the average time on page and the bounce rate, etc. All these metrics are supposed to reflect the real users' activity on your website. Meanwhile, automated traffic takes more than half of internet traffic nowadays, the experts found. So it is getting harder to collect realistic statistics and build an objective evaluation report. And you will probably have to make additional efforts to identify and exclude the “bad bot” activity from the website data.
For instance, you can apply automatic filtering of the bot traffic in Google Analytics. It works for the known bots but does not allow you to assess the real impact of bots on incoming traffic and detect new patterns of bots’ behavior that automatic algorithms can not identify.
If you notice a sudden spike in users from one particular region, abnormally high bounce rate, or want to identify the click fraud, it is worth analyzing raw website data.
A unique feature of the OWOX BI streaming pipeline is that it collects raw, non-sampled data about user behavior on your website. Collected statistics include both human and non-human activity (hits). During the users' session collection, OWOX BI identifies bot traffic using specific algorithms. However, unlike Google Analytics, OWOX BI does not exclude bot traffic from your data but marks the relevant sessions with “true” value in the "device.isBot" field of session data tables. The given approach has an edge over automatic filtering and enables you to:
- automatically identify known bots without loss of data;
- assess the impact of bots on your website traffic;
- detect the patterns of bots’ behavior;
- decide which traffic is a bot and which is not, according to your own rules;
- develop mechanisms that will diminish “bad bot” activity in your particular situation (e.g., specific user or IP address exclusion);
- revise your method of assessing bot traffic at any time and update the marketing reports even for the past periods based on the historical data imported by OWOX BI.
To conclude, having raw website data at your disposal gives you the ability to overcome the “bad bot” issues and enhance the quality of your ad performance analysis.
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