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Alexander Lau

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Feb 11, 2015
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Can this be true? http://www.smartinsights.com/advertising/are-we-drowning-in-bots.
A new report shows over half of web traffic comes from bots. What are the stats in automotive retail?
Bot-traffic-report.png
 
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Each industry looks very different with the bot traffic and human traffic. Much of the bot traffic is based on what the bot runners want to find (authentic articles, blogs, content, research...). By being in a local retail and short term marketing niche (auto sales) many of the bots will bypass the sites because they don't have what the bot runner is looking for.

Here is a Business Insider article that goes into it a bit. I'm looking into the actual Solve findings right now. "Fortunately for the auto industry, Solve Media found that the rate of bot fraud was lower on car sites than it was generally elsewhere on the web."

http://www.businessinsider.com/bots-cost-car-brands-500-million-in-us-2014-6
 
For more details on bot traffic, check out the attached Automotive Website Traffic Quality Report - Q3 2016 from Orbee.

From said report....

"In our quarterly quality report (bot edition) for the automotive industry, Orbee tracked over 100 million visits to hundreds of dealership websites and found 42% of all dealership website traffic to be from bots."

There's some pretty good info in the report, definitely recommend you check out the whole thing.
 

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  • Orbee-Traffic Quality Report-2016Q3.pdf
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@Alexander Lau It is definitely eye opening but it is true and the smaller the website is, the bigger the % of bot traffic you will have!

@Jason thanks for sharing our traffic quality report.

For automotive websites, the issue with bad vs. good bots is very different.

Good bots are crawlers and indexing bots that Google / Yahoo uses to index the internet which is good but it can be bad as they can scrape data from your site to build market pricing in your region or do competitive intelligence by vendors who could potentially sell that information to your competitors.

In terms of bad bots, you should be concerned about them when it comes to paid advertising traffic sources. Based on our research, 40%+ of paid advertising traffic were bots or non-human traffic but it really depends on what type of advertising you do. Adwords usually has <3% bot traffic whereas display, retargeting, email can have on average 40-50% bot traffic.

If you suspect some of your traffic to have bots, you can easily do a quick test in Google Analytics by taking a look at your traffic source by Service Provider or Device type. If you have service providers who are not usually associated to home or business internet (T-mo, Cox, Comcast) and see a lot of traffic coming from servers like Amazon or Digital Ocean, then you should have some concern. In terms of device type, if you see more than 70% of the traffic coming from desktop, you should definitely be concerned that you have bot traffic unless of course if you were only targeting desktop (Although I don't know any ad campaigns that would target specifically desktop).

Few resources that can help point you in the right direction below:

blog post on how to detect suspicous traffic:
http://blog.orbee.co/blog/wasteful-ad-spend-detection
C4uL-oNUMAAjiH-.jpg
 
@Alexander Lau It is definitely eye opening but it is true and the smaller the website is, the bigger the % of bot traffic you will have!

@Jason thanks for sharing our traffic quality report.

For automotive websites, the issue with bad vs. good bots is very different.

Good bots are crawlers and indexing bots that Google / Yahoo uses to index the internet which is good but it can be bad as they can scrape data from your site to build market pricing in your region or do competitive intelligence by vendors who could potentially sell that information to your competitors.

In terms of bad bots, you should be concerned about them when it comes to paid advertising traffic sources. Based on our research, 40%+ of paid advertising traffic were bots or non-human traffic but it really depends on what type of advertising you do. Adwords usually has <3% bot traffic whereas display, retargeting, email can have on average 40-50% bot traffic.

If you suspect some of your traffic to have bots, you can easily do a quick test in Google Analytics by taking a look at your traffic source by Service Provider or Device type. If you have service providers who are not usually associated to home or business internet (T-mo, Cox, Comcast) and see a lot of traffic coming from servers like Amazon or Digital Ocean, then you should have some concern. In terms of device type, if you see more than 70% of the traffic coming from desktop, you should definitely be concerned that you have bot traffic unless of course if you were only targeting desktop (Although I don't know any ad campaigns that would target specifically desktop).

Few resources that can help point you in the right direction below:

blog post on how to detect suspicous traffic:
http://blog.orbee.co/blog/wasteful-ad-spend-detection
View attachment 3197
Great presentation from #NADA100 @Dantheman ! Combine this slide with the one that came 2 slides later, one really begins to see the big picture! Bots aren't the only issue -
34%25%20out%20of%20market.png
 
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As I told @georgenenni here. There are ways to combat click fraud and even a potential business model for eager automotive heads.

--------------------------------------------

There's plenty of tools that can be used to determine paid search click fraud. In fact, I was going to create a system in order for dealers to get back that which was fraudulently clicked (taking a % of what was returned to them). I mean, they wouldn't have anything in the first place right? It's like a whistle blower program, incentivized.

https://www.clickcease.com/howitworks.html (for $50 / domain, this is a no-brainer) is fantastic!
We Save You Extra
The majority of your saving will be by auto blocking click fraud. In addition. we will send a report to AdWords on your behalf asking for a refund.
 
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There are other several key indicators of non-human traffic:
Screen-size (typically insanely large resolution not consistent with consumer screen rez)
Region (located in cities with AWS severs)
Coupling of bounce rate with ASD

Goes without saying that bot traffic should be part of COGS. Whatever investment you're making in digital channels, the price should have expected bot traffic baked into it.
 
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Yep,
@Alexander Lau It is definitely eye opening but it is true and the smaller the website is, the bigger the % of bot traffic you will have!

@Jason thanks for sharing our traffic quality report.

For automotive websites, the issue with bad vs. good bots is very different.

Good bots are crawlers and indexing bots that Google / Yahoo uses to index the internet which is good but it can be bad as they can scrape data from your site to build market pricing in your region or do competitive intelligence by vendors who could potentially sell that information to your competitors.

In terms of bad bots, you should be concerned about them when it comes to paid advertising traffic sources. Based on our research, 40%+ of paid advertising traffic were bots or non-human traffic but it really depends on what type of advertising you do. Adwords usually has <3% bot traffic whereas display, retargeting, email can have on average 40-50% bot traffic.

If you suspect some of your traffic to have bots, you can easily do a quick test in Google Analytics by taking a look at your traffic source by Service Provider or Device type. If you have service providers who are not usually associated to home or business internet (T-mo, Cox, Comcast) and see a lot of traffic coming from servers like Amazon or Digital Ocean, then you should have some concern. In terms of device type, if you see more than 70% of the traffic coming from desktop, you should definitely be concerned that you have bot traffic unless of course if you were only targeting desktop (Although I don't know any ad campaigns that would target specifically desktop).

Few resources that can help point you in the right direction below:

blog post on how to detect suspicous traffic:
http://blog.orbee.co/blog/wasteful-ad-spend-detection
View attachment 3197


Yep, agreed on Desktop. Easiest indicator. We tend to see a lot of traffic where desktop originating traffic is 95%+!