The Importance of Bot Management in Your Marketing Strategy

Marketing teams need a comprehensive bot management solution to address the challenges posed by bot traffic and protect marketing analytics. Bot management is designed to protect marketing efforts from bot-generated invalid traffic by accurately and efficiently classifying traffic and stopping unwanted. This allows you to maximize your marketing investments, achieve genuine engagement, and ensure accurate performance metrics. This blog will cover how bots affect your marketing efforts and what you can do to protect your investments.

How has marketing changed in recent years?

Marketing has evolved into a powerful engine driving business growth in the digital era. The advent of the internet and social media platforms has revolutionized how businesses connect with their target audiences. Today, marketing is not just about selling products or services; it's about creating compelling brand stories, engaging with customers, and fostering loyalty.

Nowadays, businesses can leverage data analytics and sophisticated targeting tools to deliver personalized messages to specific audience segments, maximizing their marketing ROI. Tracking and analyzing campaign performance allows businesses to make data-driven decisions and refine their marketing approaches, leading to improved results and growth.

However, while the digital landscape offers numerous opportunities, it presents unique challenges. One such challenge growing exponentially is the threat of automated traffic, also known as bots. Imperva’s latest threat research has revealed that almost half of all internet traffic is made up of bots.

What are bots, and how do they affect your website?

Let’s start with the basics of bots – what is a bot? Bots are software programs that perform automated tasks, ranging from simple actions like filling out a form to more complex functions like scraping a website for data. Technological advancements have led to nearly endless possibilities regarding online actions bots can perform. These advancements and changes to how we interact with applications in our daily lives have given rise to many new uses of bots. Some are good, while others are dubious and often downright nefarious.

Generally, bots can be categorized as good or bad, judging by their intent when interacting with applications. Examples of good bots include search engine crawlers that play a crucial role in building and maintaining a searchable index of web pages. Through indexing, these bots enable users to find the most relevant websites that match their queries. These bots are essential for online businesses as they help potential customers easily discover and access their products, services, and websites.

Bad bots, on the other hand, are programmed to automate tasks with malicious intent. Examples of bad bots include web scraping bots that extract data from websites without permission for various uses to gain a competitive advantage. They can also hoard inventory, targeting high-demand products and reselling them at a higher price. More malicious examples include distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting applications. Some bad bots even engage in criminal activities like fraud and theft. One example of this is using bots for credential stuffing, one of the most common types of bot attacks. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has compiled a comprehensive list of 21 bot attacks in its Automated Threat Handbook.

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How does bot traffic hinder your marketing efforts?

Bots significantly contribute to ‘invalid traffic’—any activity that doesn't come from a real user with genuine interest. Such traffic can substantially impact marketing efforts. These automated programs can skew marketing analytics, inflate conversion rates, and engage in ad fraud. The result? Inaccurate data, wasted resources, and a damaged brand reputation.

Bots visiting a website can inflate traffic numbers, leading to inaccurate data and skewed metrics. This can negatively affect marketing strategies, as businesses may base their decisions on unreliable data, ultimately impacting their bottom line. For example, if a marketing team relies on website traffic data to determine the success of a campaign, inflated numbers due to bot traffic can make them believe that their efforts are more successful than they are. This can lead to wasted resources, improper budget allocation, and missed growth opportunities.

Bots can generate fake traffic, clicks, and conversions, resulting in misleading insights and poor decision-making. Advertisers often pay for ad impressions, clicks, or conversions from bots, resulting in wasted ad spend. By distorting user behavior and demographic data, bots can interfere with audience targeting efforts. If bots are erroneously included in the data analysis, it becomes challenging to understand the actual preferences and characteristics of real customers.

Moreover, bots can pose security risks by attempting to exploit vulnerabilities, steal sensitive data, or perform automated attacks on marketing platforms or websites. Such security breaches can expose customer data or disrupt marketing campaigns, leading to legal and financial consequences.

It is important to note that bot attacks ultimately affect your customers, preventing them from accessing necessary goods, services, and information. Any negative impact on customer experience (CX) will eventually directly impact the bottom line. Let’s take an account takeover attack, for example, if such an attack succeeds in compromising your user accounts. Customers now need to invest their time in unlocking accounts, addressing fraudulent charges, and updating credit card information due to data breaches. These experiences breed frustration, erode trust in the brand, and elevate churn rates.

Can good bots affect your marketing campaigns, too?

The short answer is yes; even good bots can sometimes raise concerns. Good bots can significantly impact web analytics reports because they can make certain pages appear more popular than they are. For example, a good bot may generate an impression for a page on your website that you advertise, but that ad click never converts. These fake impressions originating from bots can lead to a lower performance for advertisers and result in skewed marketing analytics, ultimately leading to incorrect decision-making. Therefore, it is crucial to accurately distinguish between traffic generated by legitimate human users and good and bad bots to make informed business decisions.

How can bot management help?

Here’s how implementing a bot management strategy can help protect your marketing efforts:

1. Accurate data and insights: A bot management solution can help marketing teams identify and filter out bot traffic, ensuring their analytics are based on genuine human interactions. This leads to more accurate data and insights, allowing marketing teams to make better decisions and optimize their strategies effectively.
2. Improved ROI: By eliminating bot traffic and ad fraud, marketing teams can ensure their budgets are spent on reaching real customers, leading to a higher return on investment (ROI) for their marketing efforts.
3. Enhanced user experience: Bots can slow down websites and impact the user experience, leading to higher bounce rates and lower conversions. Implementing a bot management solution can help maintain website performance and ensure a smooth experience for genuine users.
4. Better security: Bots can also pose a security risk, as they can be used for malicious activities such as account takeovers, spamming, and data theft. A robust bot management solution can help protect businesses from these threats and safeguard their valuable data.
5. Breaking down silos: Implementing a bot management solution requires close cooperation between marketing and security teams. This can help bridge the gap between these two departments, leading to better communication and a more cohesive approach to tackling threats affecting your brand.

In short, effective bot management protects your marketing budget from wasted clicks and impressions, maintains a level playing field for fair competition, and safeguards your campaigns against fraudulent activities. This empowers you to focus on connecting with real customers, optimizing your marketing strategies, and driving meaningful results that truly matter.

Safeguard your marketing campaigns with Imperva

Imperva empowers marketing teams to make informed business decisions based on accurate analytics by offering full visibility and control over human, good, and bad bot traffic. Our Advanced Bot Protection provides industry-leading bot management capabilities that safeguard mission-critical websites, mobile apps, and APIs from all automated threats. It protects your marketing metrics, KPIs, and conversion rates from unwanted bot traffic so that you can base your marketing decisions on genuine human interactions rather than misleading bot traffic.

Imperva continuously monitors online interactions, maintaining the seamless flow of business-critical traffic and ensuring your actual users aren’t victims of the fight against bots. Our comprehensive solution provides clear visibility into bot traffic and gives businesses the control they need to make informed decisions based on accurate analysis.

By stopping unwanted bot traffic, businesses can mitigate the associated risks while improving their websites' overall performance due to reduced infrastructure strain. Furthermore, it mitigates the risk of damaged brand reputation and enhances the customer experience by keeping malicious bots at bay.

We recognize that any attack, at any time, can seriously threaten your business. Unlike other bot management vendors, we offer the dedicated support of a team of expert bot analysts with more experience fighting bad bots than any competing solution.

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