Let’s say you’re looking over the analytics for your business website, and while traffic to the site looks really good and strong, you notice that converting the visitors into sales isn’t happening. What’s going on?
It may surprise you to learn that the majority of your visitors may not be human at all. We’ll talk about it in this issue.
Rise of the Bots
An Internet bot is essentially a software application that uses code to systematically browse the web. As is the case with some humans, there are “good bots” and “bad bots.”
The good bots generally carry out their work for a number of decent reasons, like enabling more accurate online searches, chatting with visitors to your site to convert a sale or any number of helpful tasks.
Bad bots are a bit more sinister. Their goals are to disrupt a site in a host of ways, like slowing down traffic, negatively impacting customer satisfaction, sniffing around for customer data or getting pricing data from your business to be relayed to one of your competitors.
How Prevalent is Bot Activity on the Web?
Just recently, website security firm Incapsula released a fantastic comprehensive report about bot traffic trends in 2016. According to the report, 48% of online traffic in 2016 was carried out by humans. The remaining 52% were bots.
Among the more disturbing findings from the report is this: out of the 100,000 domains that were surveyed, every 3rd site visitor was an attack bot. 94.2% of those surveyed domains dealt with at least one bot attack over a 90-day period. Those attacks were automated and targeted thousands of domains simultaneously.
A Bot Army?
The origin of a bot attack can be difficult to track down because they’re usually a series of computers that have been taken over by malware that’s controlled by hackers to carry out the automated tasks.
Call Caldiatech To Position Your Business’s Site for Success
Technology – and security – are constantly changing in the digital age. That’s why it’s crucial that you have a partner on the cutting edge of technology.
Call us here at Caldiatech to make sure your business’s site is optimized and protected. You can reach us by calling 800-728-1411 or visiting us online.