Bots vs. The Marketing Team
With bots and automation accounting for 50% or more of a site’s visitors, it can be difficult for organizations to make well-informed sales and marketing decisions. Large numbers of bots can easily skew an organization’s view of its customers, and can directly rob marketing programs of efficiency. However in addition to adding noise into an organization’s data, automation can directly sap the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. A few examples include:
- Skewing of Marketing Analytics - Not all bots are bad. The automated web crawlers used by search engines are essential for helping customers find a particular site or application. However, since half of a site’s traffic is often generated by bots, marketing teams need to be able to distinguish real visitors from the bots in order to make informed business decisions. While bots can inflate the overall traffic numbers for a site, they likewise will artificially drag down conversion rates since bots will never convert to a sale.
- Click and Ad Fraud - Bots can also be used to effectively steal marketing dollars from an organization. Bots can be created to click ads hosted on a site owned by the bot owner in order to drive ad revenue. The click costs the organization real marketing dollars but will never result in an actual impression on a real user or in a sale. This wastes an organization’s limited marketing budget and drags down the ROI of the campaign.
- Search Engine De-optimization - Bots that scrape an organization’s content can also have downstream impacts on an organization’s SEO efforts. If the same content is replicated on multiple sites, SEO models can view that content as less valuable, causing the true owner of the data to lose visibility in search results.
