One very useful tool used by Internet marketers every day is analytics. Drilling down on analytics is how to find out what is working well and what is not returning the investment. Unfortunately, almost every website is hit with bad bots that can negatively affect your analytics.
Marketers seem to have a vague awareness about server log files, but little know these log files can be used to clean up the analytical data you use when making marketing decisions for a website.
Using these log files, you can identify the bad bots, which most are executing Javascript, inflating analytics numbers and expanding resources, scraping and duplicating content. A report of 2014 bot traffic looked at 20,000 websites over a 90-day period and found bots account for 56% of all website traffic. In fact, 29% of it was reported as malicious nature.
The reports show the more you build your brand, the bigger target you become for the bots.
Source: Incapsula
There are a couple of different services to use for analytics. Some of these programs are free and others have a fee. The paid services may offer programs that help get rid of the bad bot traffic. If your analytics service does not offer this and you are sick of seeing all this bot traffic check out Search Engine Lands 3 Steps to Find and Block Bad Bots. It explains how you check the file logs and manipulate it to stop these bad bots.
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