Six Ways Fake Traffic Wrecks Analytics Data and Performance
Brandon
|Data & Analytics | September 18, 2024
The high rate of fake web traffic is a serious problem for business leaders. Results from our research indicate that 2023 saw a 58% year-over-year increase in fake traffic – and that it makes up 17.9% of total web traffic.
Fake or invalid traffic is any type of web engagement generated from nonhuman or malicious activity, such as bots or click farms. It compromises business data by altering engagement metrics, giving you a false impression of real website visitors and engagement.
Here are six ways fake web traffic specifically compromises your data integrity and ultimately performance.
Distorted Conversion Rates
Fake page views from nonhuman users are a serious problem because aggregate page views are the denominator for many of your critical top-of-funnel conversations such as request demo forms or trial sign-ups. Your conversion rates might be artificially deflated due to nonhuman visitors skewing the visibility you need to be effective.
Stop and think: Where are your page views actually coming from? More importantly, how do you know for sure?
Similarly, bounce rates serve as a key metric and indicator for web content and design quality. After all, if people leave your site shortly after arriving on a page, or if a large portion of visitors do not navigate off of the home page, there must be a reason. Right?
Not so fast. These data points are easy for fake users and bots to corrupt. Essentially, all of your conversion or engagement rates are likely bogged down by “users” who were never going to convert in the first place!
Without filtering out fake traffic, your numbers may be skewed by 20% or more, giving you a flawed picture of metrics necessary to understanding website effectiveness and general demand in the marketplace.
Degraded Customer Experiences
Inventory hoarding is just one way that fake traffic degrades the customer experience. This is a practice where bots fill carts with items and leave them to sit. Those items show as low in stock or unavailable in virtual inventories, creating a false scarcity event. Customers who are shopping for them see the status and go elsewhere, leaving your site without making a purchase.
According to our analysis of the 2023 holiday shopping season, 22% of web traffic to eCommerce sites were fake, more than double the number from the prior year. A staggering one in five online holiday shoppers were not real. This poses a huge problem for actual customers, who will move on to the next site if they don’t find what they’re looking for.
Compromised SEO Rankings
Fake traffic affects the customer experience in other ways, too. Bogged-down servers that cannot keep up with traffic spikes can result in slower page speeds or even website downtime that affects both user access and your search engine ranking. Google considers page speed as part of the user experience, and it figures into page rankings. A score of 90 or above is considered good, while you should work on improving scores between 50 and 89.
If fake traffic is constantly attacking your site, you might lose out on opportunities for your product to be found at the right time by your highest-intent customers.
Also not to be overlooked, flawed A/B testing results full of bots misguide website experience changes: you may unknowingly introduce more friction to customers, move forward with irrelevant messaging, or ship ineffective visual changes that turn away inbound traffic.
Polluted Operational Workflows
Web traffic polluted by fake users also wreck additional workflows and processes downstream.
Fake visitors ultimately flood web-based remarketing lists and nullify their effectiveness. That same data also infiltrates lookalike audiences for demand gen campaigns, leading to a snowball effect of inefficiency at the top of the funnel.
Similarly, bots and bad actors who complete web forms hog precious space in your CRM and marketing automation platforms…and it only gets worse. These same “users” infiltrate nurture emails and newsletters… then their emails begin to bounce (they aren’t real, after all), degrading your email send reputation and deliverability rates. This drastically increases the risk that your emails to real users get flagged as spam or never make it to their inbox in the first place.
Lost Revenue Opportunities
Our 2024 State of Fake Traffic report shows that at least 4.1% of fake traffic comes from paid sources, depending on the industry. When we zoom out, the numbers are far more concerning: Digital advertising spend in the U.S. alone hit $270 billion in 2023, which means that marketing departments wasted over $10 billion on ads that attracted fake website visitors last year!
Assuming at least 4.1% of traffic from digital ads are fake or nonhuman and leveraging a standard Return on Ad Spend (RoAS) of 4:1, that’s over $40 billion in lost revenue opportunity.
To make it worse, the data gained from fake web visits feed back into analyses and lead to poor decisions about how to allocate future spend and target unknowingly polluted audiences. This effect grows over time, creating larger deficits between advertising spending and the ability to target real buyers and achieve business objectives.
Drained Go-To-Market Resources
Costs go far beyond the financial impact of spending money on ineffective campaigns. Contextualize the time, effort and manpower devoted to analysis, strategy, and content creation for underperforming channels. What about the rise in internal tension and mistrust? Very quickly your operations can fall into a state of despair.
Protect Your Data and Funnel Efficiency with CHEQ
To be clear, not all bots and fake traffic are out to wreak havoc. But the malicious ones are good at what they do, and they are getting better all the time. Generative AI has changed the landscape, moving scrapers, automated tools, and sophisticated bots to the top of the threat list.
The good news is that we can detect this traffic — our research shows that we can. As a leader in Go-to-Market Security, CHEQ is ready to help you spot fake traffic before it disrupts your analytics data and business-critical workflows. Get a demo to learn how we can help you mitigate the impact of fake web traffic across your digital initiatives.
