Bot or not? Fraud or not? Supporting data is crucial - FouAnalytics

Bots are scary right? But no, you don't have to be scared of them if you have FouAnalytics in place to measure your digital ads and websites. That's because with FouAnalytics, you will have the supporting data to "see Fou yourself" what bots they were, where they came from, and what they were trying to do on your site. Legacy fraud verification vendors just give you % IVT, with no further explanation or details, so you can't do anything. With the newfound insights from FouAnalytics, you can take appropriate action, or do nothing, because you don't need to. Let me explain.

Bot or not? Fraud or not?

The screen shot below shows a huge surge in red (bots) hitting a website. The question is not whether they were bots or not, the question is whether it was fraud or not, and whether you needed to do anything about it.

These were obvious bots, as you can see from the supporting data below. Bots come from the United States, from Amazon, Microsoft, and Cloudflare data centers. And their IP addresses are not disguised, and highly repeated -- i.e. the same software program repeatedly loading the webpages.

But if you look further, at a few more supporting data grids in FouAnalytics (below), you will see that these bots had no referrer. That means they loaded the page directly; they didn't click an ad to arrive on your site. The right side data grid also shows that the urls did not have the typical utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign query strings which would show that the user clicked through from some paid media campaign. Again these bots hit the pages directly.

This means these were bots, but they were not ad fraud bots that caused your ad to load and clicked on the ads to get to your site. Knowing this, the advertiser was comfortable that they didn't have to take action and optimize their digital campaigns to reduce ad fraud. We made this determination within minutes because the supporting data was there, so the advertiser could understand 1) that the bots were marked correctly, but 2) they were not ad fraud bots, these bots hit the site directly, and didn't click through from paid ads.

Scary or not? Fraud or not?

The chart below shows a client that is 3 days into measurement with FouAnalytics. There's SO much red and yellow, should they be scared or not?

No need to be scared when you have the supporting data, color-coded for you in FouAnalytics. Within seconds you can see what bots those are. The yellow is "Googlebot" a search crawler coming to the site. Since this is a lower traffic site, the yellow percentage appears to be a larger percent of the stacked percentage chart.

Isolating the dark red, we can immediately see these were definitely bots (platform = Linux x86_64), but they hit the page directly (referrer = blank). These bots did not load ads or click on them fraudulently.

So, despite the "scary looking" amount of yellow and red, the client was happy to understand these were not fraud bots that were chewing through digital ad budgets and committing click fraud.

So what?

Put simply, supporting data is crucial for practitioners to understand whether something is fraud or not, not just bot or not. These are details that legacy verification vendors have not provided to their customers for the last 10 years. Customers using those vendors were limited by those vendors and could not take appropriate action. When you upgrade your analytics, you can "see Fou yourself" how much you have been missing, and take action, as appropriate.

See: Advertisers Replace Moat, DoubleVerify, IAS with FouAnalytics