10 Reasons Your Website Needs a Bot Protection Software

For most B2C businesses, a website is a medium to communicate the value proposition to its audience. For others like ecommerce, listing portals and auction websites, a website is the business model in itself. In both the cases, a business website is a hub to showcase unique content, convert customers and drive customer engagement. And online businesses invest a lot in building, managing and maintaining such content rich websites that are specifically designed for maximum customer conversions. A business websites being such an important element in doing business, owners and managers need to take proactive website security measures, very specifically bot detection control measures when bots account for more than 97% of today’s web application attacks.

IT teams and marketing need to be aware that bots are always looking to infiltrate a website, steal content, pricing information and other customer user data. Anti-bot protection is therefore essential to your website’s security. Based on our experience from protecting large websites from bots, we have listed down 10 major website threats caused by bots that a bot protection software can help safeguard against.

1. Content Scraping Prevention
2. Your competition and Fraudsters scrape your unique content from your website and use it elsewhere without your consent
   
   Stealing original content from a website to refurbish the content on other platforms amounts to content scraping or web scraping. This is done on a large-scale using automated computer scripts that download original content and upload the same on newer platforms. Web scraping leads to lower search engine ranking. This will directly impact genuine traffic on your website as your readers / viewers will move to other platforms serving the same content. This will lead to less advertising opportunities.



2. Price Scraping Prevention
3. Automated theft of pricing data
   
   Price Scraping refers to real-time theft of pricing data from a website. These prices could be of products, services or both. Automated computer software techniques are used to steal this data in real-time. Price Scraping affects your business by reducing customer visits and conversions. Your prospect customers end up buying the products listed on your store from your competitors’ website. This results in lower revenue and lower brand value for your business. You might also see a significant cost being incurred by the server to accommodate the scraping requests.



3. Click Fraud Protection
4. Bots and Competitors Clicking Your Ads and Eating your Ad Budgets
   
   In the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, repeated clicks on an advertisement hosted on a website, with or without using bots, is referred to as Click Fraud. In a PPC campaign, a brand pays for the number of clicks that are made on its advertisement. Click Fraud is used to increase the number of hits on the advertisement to either drain the advertising budget of the brand or to increase the revenue of the website where the advertisement is hosted.



4. Listing Scrape Protection
5. Automated theft of listings
   
   Automated capture of online listings from a website is referred to as listing theft or listing scraping. This involves scraping or stealing of unique listings using automated scripts or bots. The most immediate and major loss is loss of unique listings. This results in lower search engine rankings, lower customer visits, and lower conversions. Moreover, it helps your competitors’ business grow using the hard-work put by your team to generate the listings in the first place. The other immediate loss is high usage of server capacity and higher server cost, which is due to the rampant scraping by bots.



5. Skewed Analytics Prevention
6. Marketing analytics presenting all wrong stats
   
   Website analytics systems are designed to help understand traffic patterns and user behavior on a website. More than 50% of all traffic on the web is generated by bots. An effective analytics system needs to differentiate between the genuine human traffic and the bot traffic and give details of both types of traffic separately. Website analytics become skewed when the differentiation is not done and the bot traffic adds to the genuine traffic in the metrics. The results then show incorrect metrics, based on which, incorrect marketing decisions are made.



6. Auction Snipping Prevention
7. Auction bots committing frauds on bidding websites
   
   Auction snipers or auction bots prevents human bidders from winning auctions by placing a bid likely to exceed the current highest bid (which may be hidden) as late as possible - usually seconds before the end of the auction - giving other bidders no time to outbid the sniper. Auction sniping also allows sellers to use bots to bid for the item to inflate the prices, making it impossible for genuine users to buy listed products at a reasonable price. Auction bots frustrate auction companies when fraudsters steal bidder information from auction websites and offer to sell them the same items, they are currently bidding, thus drawing bidders away from the legitimate auction sites.



7. Eliminate Bot Traffic on your website
8. Fake traffic on your website presenting incorrect marketing analytics
   
   Web Traffic that is directed to a website using bots constitutes bot traffic. This traffic adds to the total purchased traffic but is made of only bot hits and no human users. If you are buying traffic for your website, you could end up losing a sizeable chunk of your spend to bots. Secondly, if you further redirect traffic from your website to other websites, these bots can propagate to your customers’ websites. Also, you would need to spend a lot of server capacity to process the unwanted bad bot traffic.



8. Eliminate Form / Comment Spam
9. Bots Filling out your website forms
   
   If your website forms are programmed to send auto-mailers to your email, you will start receiving junk emails. If you own a classifieds or a listing platform, your website will start serving fake listings to genuine users. Similarly, if you own a social platform, your genuine users will now start coming across more fake profiles.



9. Over Crawling Prevention
10. Slowing Down Your Site Load Times
    
    Crawlers are used for various purposes, the most significant of which is Search Engine Indexing. Sometimes, crawlers crawl web pages excessively and result into over-crawling a website. Every hit made by a crawler adds to your server capacity and cost. When over-crawling occurs, your server costs go high and the server capacity is reduced. This excessive cost could be beyond 50% of the server cost being paid currently.



10. Brute Force Prevention
11. DDos Attacks on websites
    
    Hacking attempts at stealing user login credentials and key user details using bots. The loss of brand value due to brute force attacks is huge as the customers’ account gets compromised. Moreover, the reconciliation for loss of customers’ reward points and other actions taken by the fraudsters is a big overhead.

By staying on top of these 10 website threats caused by bots, online businesses can effectively build their customers' trust and their own company's reputability, taking the first steps to ensuring that they have a successful, long-lasting online presence.