Dive Brief:
- According to research, as much as 62% of all web traffic is coming from automated sources, or so called "bots," but new information reveals that most bots are not meant to be malicious.
- These "good bots" are designed to pull data from web sites for things like searches (Google is in fact one of the biggest bots). For example, a bot will ping a website like Amazon or eBay to populate search results with product pricing and each ping counts as traffic.
- Pixalate CEO Jalal Nasir told Adweek his company sees around seven million unique bot combinations -- only about two million, he says, were designed to be malicious toward advertisers.
Dive Insight:
Bot traffic has so long been an enemy of the digital world that many marketers and publishers have lost sight that automated traffic isn't always intended to malicious. In fact, in the case of Google for example, automated traffic is actually encouraged.
Automated bot traffic has also been increased with stricter viewability standards since sites designed solely to rack up ad views push ads out in plain view at the cost of content. Publishers fuel the fire by purchasing traffic to boost ad revenue, but with an estimated 52% of all purchased traffic coming from bots, it's only hurting publishers in the long run.
