Hi
I have the feeling that some top-lists send fake (bot) traffic. Although it seems to be some headless-browser traffic (selenium, phantomjs?) and some development effort has been done in order to make them look like human, I think they are bots.
My normal bounce rate: about 30 %
Bounce rate from these 4 top lists: about 5 %
Now comes the fun part (because when you developed your analytics tool by yourself, you have full control
)
- N > 5 % of the total hits of one toplist, have also been referred by another toplist (which is kinda odd)
- The time between opening the website and the first click has a variation between all these users which is less than 10 seconds (tMax - tMin < 10 sec)
- None of these users stay on the startpage for more than a minute (users from other sources average 1:13 min on the startpage)
- All users have JavaScript enabled
So what did I do?
I implemented a more advanced bot check in my application: I consider a user real once he moves the mouse and/or swipes the screen.
Now this is running since two hours, and see:
- About 85 % of my users from other sources trigger the botcheck event (I think the other 15% have the browser cache not loading the new JS code)
- About 0.5 % of the users from all these toplists trigger the botcheck event
Here's a good guy. He's not a bot. He opened the startpage and triggered the bot check:
i.imgur.com/91w4Mci.png
Here's a bot. It's a Windows 10 computer and clicked on a tag on the startpage. He inevitably had to move the mouse but didn't: i.imgur.com/d1REqn4.png (I don't have 30 posts, can't add URLs)
Also note: "ClosePage" is JavaScript triggered therefore they are executing JavaScript.
I am aware that some of these will obviously just implement a mouse move.
I'm not sure if I can just post the URLs here without getting sued by them, but I suggest: analyze your link-partners and see if the users that they are sending are behaving in the same way as your own users.
In my conclusion they are bots! You can find excuses for one or two not moving the mouse. But since I started tracking it, I'm speaking of hundreds, and everyone else but refs from these toplists, moving.
These toplists are sending hundreds of bots to you to make you think they are actual users, so that you keep the link to their page
I'm flying to vacation tomorrow, but I'm pissed (maybe for everyone else here, it's old news) and I'm going to make my bot detection better and more generic. Also, when I'm done, I will make it available for free for everyone so that these toplist-scammers can fuck off.
So:
- Did anyone experience the same?
- How can I help others not falling for it as well?