Why do I need bots in the affiliate marketing?

We live in an era of the rapid development of innovations and digital technologies. The most popular resource is information, the possession of which opens almost all doors. Today, any product or service can be purchased online without any problems. There are no longer any technological or geographical restrictions on communications. People live in the network, spending most of their free and working time on gadgets.

The smooth operation of the web is provided by “bots”. These are programs that help users find something, give hints, entertain, and perform many other commands. Internet bots are fully automated and can even replace the work of a person to perform routine tasks.

Is your traffic real?

A website is considered profitable if it’s regularly visited by a large number of people. The success of the site, in turn, depends on the degree of promotion and recognition among users. Real traffic represents real people who visit a website and spend a certain amount of time there. You can determine the interest in your content by the number of ad views, clicks, and scrolling. And evidence of user activity can be conversion indicators, which can also be used to determine the cost-effectiveness of certain advertising tricks.   

This type of traffic is also called organic because users entered search queries manually and went to your site purposefully. In addition to search engines, you can get organic in social networks or any online communities.

You need to check the traffic quality in order to detect bots in your statistics reports on time. For this purpose, online moderation and bot filters are used. AdsBridge has an Anti-Fraud feature that helps you to track fraudulent sessions, conversions, and clicks based on 10 metrics.  By using this function, you can determine the ratio of real and bot traffic on your site. The tracker also allows you to distribute bot traffic to alternative offers.

What does the “bot traffic” mean?

We have sorted out the concept of good traffic, and now we will analyze the concept of bot traffic. At the time when the real visitors bring you real money, the bot traffic benefits only the developer of the bot. At the initial stage, bots are not easy to find, because they copy the behavior of users: they open pages and click on links. However, in this case, the advertiser loses money on each impression of the ad that the bot “saw”.

What are bots?

Let’s take the entire array of incoming traffic as100%. In this case, about half is taken by the real traffic, and the remaining 50% is bot traffic. However, not all bots are bad. Their functions, purpose, and results determine whether they are harmful or useful.

We do not take into account garbage traffic, i.e. when random user comes through a link of questionable origin. According to statistics, garbage traffic accounts for about half of all fraudulent traffic.

Useful bots

Good bots are those that support the functioning of a service. They reduce the use of manual labor to a minimum and process data much faster. Their field of tasks is limited, they do not clog the system and do not harm users.

Chatbots are ubiquitous. This virtual “assistant” processes information according to a typical algorithm and in some sense can replace the work of a person. The bot can communicate, answer questions and process customer requests, so they can often be found in the site’s support service. The bot can play with you online on the other side of the screen, report currency rates or the result of a sports match. Good bots are the following:

• Search bots
• RSS bots (for information flows)
• Bots for monitoring
• Crawlers (part of the search engine)

Malicious bots

The only purpose of these bots is to infiltrate the system under the guise of ordinary users. For some time, bots remain unnoticed and sometimes manage to grab the lion’s share of traffic and become the cause of an advertiser’s headache.

– bots for DDoS attacks that make it difficult to use web resources.

A malicious bot for traffic can be compared to a bomber. It clogs the statistics of data on traffic with low-quality advertising and interferes with the normal operation of the site.

How do bots differ from each other?

As you already know, both useful and malicious bots are programs that fulfill a specific purpose. More precisely, this is a targeted collection and exchange of data in the network.

“Good” bots are only engaged in searching and providing data. They are not subject to spontaneous bursts of activity or “bombardments”, unlike malicious bots, which have a number of “viral” qualities, including:

– disguise;

– attack;

– mass data capturing;

– the uncontrolled disposal of data.

How do I detect bot activity?

After launching your site, you will need to monitor the dynamics of its operation. To get a reliable picture, use trackers and analytics services. AdsBridge, for example, allows you to track bots and monitor their behavior on your site, as well as manage traffic sources.

It’s quite easy to distinguish the flow of bot traffic from organic traffic using filtering tools and metrics. Filters for various indicators will help you view traffic in detail: the source, browser, operating system type, and device that the target actions were performed from. For example, if your site was unexpectedly visited by more than 10 thousand users who do not behave normally, these may be bots. Regular users need time to familiarize themselves with the website and make clicks. Bots also copy their behavior, which is easy to notice.

You need to fight with bots, although it is not easy. It is important to understand that these are your money and the reputation of the platform. Don’t let things take their course, choose the tracker wisely and stay in control. Good luck and let all bots leave your traffic here and now!