admin, January 2, 2018 By “Fake”, I mean that this traffic it is not generated by humans, but by a myriad of scripts, bots and other automated processes. Some are well intentioned, but most are not. These busy little bees scan for vulnerabilities on your site, wordpress login pages, test scripts and a 1001 other things.
If you only use javascript tags to collect data about your website visitors (i.e. like Google Analytics), you have absolutely no idea that this is going on. You have no idea that so much of your bandwidth and server resources are being consumed by agents that are trying to damage you.
The only way to find out what all these creepy crawlers are up to is to analyze your website’s log file. However, the results can be overwhelming compared to tag based data collection.
Ignorance is bliss
Bots usually don’t read javascript files, which means they do not show up in javascript based solutions like Google Analytics. As a result, the numbers you see mostly represent real humans. This is a nice side effect, because for marketing purposes we are usually only interested in humans.
If you’re analyzing log files, this becomes more difficult. You have a lot more information, but how to see which visitors are real and which ones are not?
As the number of malicious bots has skyrocketed over the last year, log file based analytics have diverged more and more from the javascript based numbers.
Until now, log file based analytics has mostly relied on bot detection via the information in the user agent. This catches most of the “legitimate bots” which are left out of most reports by default.
Evil bots however try to pose as real users so these usually slip through the cracks, inflating the number of visitors compared to a javascript tracker.
Best of both worlds
To solve this problem, Logaholic 7 now features “Behavior Based” bot detection. This classifies all clients as a “bot”, unless it behaves like a human. For example, when the client requests both html and images or javascript during a visit.
In terms of bot detection, you’re now guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around.
Most reports in Logaholic display only “human” data by default, but can be switched to “all traffic” to see what the creepy crawlers are up to.
This way you have useful reports from the marketing perspective, but also from the security and IT perspective.
All new Logaholic profiles using log files will be automatically set to Behavior Based detection. Existing profiles can be switched manually – but prepare for a massive drop in visitors … and don’t shoot the messenger 🙂