How Web Bot Detection Boosts Real User Monitoring Data

The following is a guest post from Ron Abisi, Director of Sales at Distil Networks.

Catchpoint’s powerful and intuitive tools have streamlined the process for monitoring web performance in revolutionary ways. Its reporting capabilities allow businesses to gain actionable insight into user performance and engagement.

The reliability of this data, however, is dependent on having accurate data. Unfortunately, the presence of web bots on your site can distort your RUM data, thus making it difficult to get an accurate portrait. If your organization depends on KPI and analytics to measure the success of your online efforts, you need to be concerned about the expansive presence of these web bots.

Web Bots and SEO

Catchpoint makes it easy for you to engage in SEO by offering clear reports on the factors that most affect your ranking. Web bots, however, can artificially inflate your total traffic, skew your conversion rate up or down, and slow down your page load times by backlogging your servers, thus driving down your rankings.

Studies have shown that as many as 47% of online consumers expect a webpage to load in two seconds or less, and 40% will abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load. So web bots are not only affecting your site’s user experience, but they may also be driving away potential customers, resulting in lost revenue.

Web Bots and PPC

Web bots can inflate the total number of clicks your PPC ads receive by huge margins. This causes your cost per click (CPC) to go up and makes it impossible for you to tell how much of your traffic is genuine customers and how much of it is automated and irrelevant. As a result, without the use of web bot detection systems, your reports might show huge spikes in traffic but an equal decline in conversions.

Web Bots and Budgets

Catchpoint makes it refreshingly easy to track the cost and revenue of your web presence through RUM data, but web bots can wreak havoc with those numbers. Web bots can drive up your costs for marketing and IT support while slashing your margins and chasing away revenue opportunities.

By using Catchpoint Glimpse to collect RUM data, combined with web bot protection software, you can rest easy knowing that you’re getting the best and most accurate information possible about who is visiting your site.

Web Bots and Content

Aside from distorting your performance metrics, web bots can also steal your intellectual property, such as content or prices. This can have a detrimental effect on your brand, undercut your competitive advantage, decrease your sales leads, and even result in Google penalties for duplicate content if your original content has been redistributed elsewhere.

Catchpoint + Distil = Maximum Reporting Accuracy

Using a prevention system which can detect the presence of web bots, remove them completely, and keep them from coming back in the future can improve both your site’s performance and the level of insight that you can glean from your monitoring.

Catchpoint’s insightful reporting, paired with Distil’s web bot protection, which has blocked almost 17 billion bad bots in the three and a half years since it was launched, provides you with the best possible data for making important decisions about your business and website.