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Advice and answers from the ClickCease team

Intro to Bot Mitigation

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Note: Bot Mitigation detection is available for all website hosts, however the blocking feature is currently offered for WordPress based domains. We will expand the service and support other website hosts in the near future. Stay tuned!

What Is Bot Mitigation?

Bots that visit your website and perform certain dynamic actions are aiming to skew your site analytics, waste your team’s time and efforts on monitoring nonqualified conversions or reaching out to non-relevant leads, and give a false representation of your traffic quality.

Bot Mitigation aims to help you protect your onsite conversion funnels by identifying invalid and malicious users and redirecting them to a 403 page, hence - blocking them.

This product protects not only your paid marketing site visits, but also organic search and direct site visits.

How Does It Work?

Bot Mitigation is an AI capability based tool meant to detect the above threat. The block action will redirect the bot to a 403 error page - Unauthorized Access page - that is instead of letting the user into your website and harm it.

There are two main stages in which a bot can/will be excluded (blocked) - upon page load or upon a malicious site interaction (dynamic action) performed.

  • Upon page load, we will present the user with thousands of challenges. Based on the responses for those challenges, if our AI detected the visitor as a bot - it will be blocked/excluded and presented with a 403 error page.

  • If the user passed the page load challenges, we will keep monitoring its interaction with your website, and block/exclude based on the detected dynamic action.

Remember, Bot Mitigation will exclude bots only from interacting with your website (hence will not block any competitors and other human fraud sources). Bots interaction with your website will be performed in a manner that a human will not be able to execute.

Why Do I Need to Use Bot Mitigation?

Around 40% of all traffic being made has been made up by Bot and Invalid users. Bots are giving you an inaccurate understanding of your conversion rates, wasting your team’s time and resources on follow-ups, and stopping you from focusing on real potential customers.

Examples of Potential attacks Bot Mitigation Protects From:

  • Account takeover: occurs when an attacker illegally logs in to a user’s account. If the attack is successful, the malicious actor can carry out any manner of activities for their own gain.

  • Credential stuffing: testing of large numbers of compromised credentials (i.e., usernames and passwords breached from another site) against your login application to compromise those accounts for monetary gain.

  • Inventory hoarding: "Grinch bots" that automate a part, or the entirety, of the purchasing journey of your goods or services, in a manner that a normal user would be unable to undertake manually. The merchandise is then sold on the thriving reseller market at a significantly higher price, that puts it beyond the reach of consumers.

  • Denial of inventory: where an automated script repeatedly places an e-commerce products or services in the shopping cart, without ever completing the transaction.

Which Actions Can Bot Mitigation Stop the Invalid User From Doing?

  • Commenting

  • Adding items to cart

  • Sign up / Registration

  • Requesting a demo / reaching out to the support team

Does Bot Mitigation Block All Bots?

No. We don't block Known Crawlers - good bots - that perform a helpful or useful action and don’t hurt the user experience on your website while doing so.

Examples of known crawlers are search engine crawlers (GoogleBot, for example), social network bots (Facebook Bot), and SEO-related crawlers (such as Semrush). These should be handled with care as they have an important influence on your website’s ranking.

What is the Difference Between ClickCease's Paid Marketing & Bot Mitigation?

  • Paid Marketing protects your paid acquisition, making sure invalid users will not be presented with your Google or Facebook ads.

  • Bot Mitigation protects your online conversion funnels, making sure bots and invalid users cannot cause damage.

  • While Paid Marketing looks only at paid acquisition, Bot Mitigation  also protects your site from organic and direct traffic.

If you have any questions about this process, feel free to reach out to our 24/7 chat support.