Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
Many Digital Marketers have recently been noticing spikes in direct traffic numbers in recent months, which on the surface would seem like a positive development; however alot of this new direct traffic is coming in large volumes from China and Singapore and is not in fact organic traffic but bots trying to scrape data from your sites.
How do I know if this issue is affecting my site?
You can review your direct traffic reports in Google Analytics 4 and filter by country to identify any unusual activity levels from China and Singapore. If you can see your traffic is on the rise, but the sessions are not increasing business on your site, then these nefarious bots are likely the cause.
Session durations are usually extremely low, with bott traffic often being attributed to under 3 seconds and no more. You can see how long the sessions are from specific countries using filters in GA4 to identify low-quality traffic sessions coming from China and Singapore.
Why are these bots trying to access your site?
There are several reasons bots could be attempting to access your site, but they are mainly harmless, except potentially damaging your data reporting. The bots are usually trying to harvest your data and not hack into your site for security reasons. With the recent upsurge in AI models that are trained on real-world data, many of these bots are just trying to scrape content for AI machine learning.
How can you protect your data reporting from bot traffic?
There are multiple ways to protect your data from bot traffic, including creating comparisons and using filters within GA4, but the most effective method for removing bot traffic is to create a configuration tag in Google Tag Manager that excludes any traffic from China or Singapore, which will remove almost all of your bot traffic. Obviously, if you do have organic traffic coming from China and you need to be able to report on this, there are other workarounds, such as blocking traffic through Tag Manager that is engaged with your content for less than a second, which should filter out a lot of the bots.
What this means for Marketers
While bot traffic isn’t a major safety concern, it is dangerous in the sense that it can be distorting your analytics, which need to be reliable for you to report accurately internally and externally on performance. Reporting on inflated traffic figures will only come back to bite later down the line when performance doesn’t keep up with traffic levels, making sure your reporting is accurate is extremely important to ensure a coherent strategy for growth.
