Today, I am going to provide an overview of the Suspected Bot Activity Report dashboards in Sitecore CDP.
Sitecore CDP is an enterprise-level customer data platform that helps various businesses manage and lift their customer data to drive better customer personalization and experiences. The Sitecore CDP is designed to provide an exceptional experience to every individual on all digital channels. The functionality of CDP's data management is augmented with decisions, predictive analytics, experimentation, and orchestration.
Organizations are constantly searching for new and different ways to leverage the potential value of their customer data in today's data-driven environment with the goal of obtaining valuable information and making educated choices. Sitecore CDP provides you with a centralized location for storing all of your customer data, allowing you to unify, clean, and enhance it for effective analysis. The dashboard feature of Sitecore CDP enables you to concisely observe and analyze your customer data within Sitecore CDP.
The Suspected Bot Activity Report dashboard visualizes the irregular traffic and guest activities that might be attributed as bot activities from the data that is ingested by Sitecore CDP. These reports focus on the data in the cart, event, and bounce bots. Marketers or business users can use these reports to better understand the regular and irregular site traffic and help them to understand and identify suspicious trends and activities.
Marketers or business users must consider the following points before utilizing these reports:
1. The report highlights the activities that are considered suspected bot activities by Sitecore CDP, based on various calculations. However, there may be some legitimate guests that might be falsely identified as bots. Also, there may be some actual bot activities that might not be identified as bots by the Sitecore CDP.
2. Sitecore CDP only classifies the visitor’s sessions as suspected bot sessions. CDP does not classify the customer’s sessions as suspected bot sessions.
3. All the bots are not harmful or malicious for a website. Bots are information-scraping programs that might be scraping websites for information. However, when evaluating the website traffic, it is crucial to understand the percentage that might be attributed to the bot’s activities. Also, it is important to identify the bot activities that might be detrimental to the business.
4. Typically the website behavior can vary significantly from one website to another just like with other dashboard analytics. When a business user or marketer is utilizing the bot reports it is important to keep in mind the factors that might influence the amount of website traffic like email or advertisement campaigns, seasonal statistics, social media influence, and so on.
The data of the Suspected Bot Activity Report is refreshed after every 24 hours. Organizations can use the filters available in the Suspected Bot Activity Report to select the time frame to display the data. The default view shows the data for the past month with no specific channel.
Suspected Bot Traffic Reports
The Suspected Bot Traffic Reports section in the Suspected Bot Activity Report displays the various traffic metrics for the context when investigating the bot activities for the past complete month, compared to the month preceding it. Each report has a color-coded arrow next to the number. A green arrow will always point in an upward direction and signify the increase in the traffic while a red arrow will always point in a downward direction and signify the decrease in the traffic. Moreover, an arrow of gray color will always point towards the right indicating that there is neither an increase nor decrease in the traffic. By default, the traffic metrics compare the data from the past complete month to the prior month. The traffic metrics will be updated based on the selected time period from the filters.
New Visitors from Current Complete Month – It shows the total number of unique visitors on the website over the selected time period. It helps in providing a better understanding of the percentage of the bot’s activities.
Bounce Rate % for Current Complete Month – It shows the percentage of bounce rate on the website over the selected time period. Bounce rates are the sessions that include only a one-page visit. Such sessions may be attributed to the bot’s activities.
Total Bots – Current Complete Month – It shows the estimated total number of bot sessions on the website over the selected time period.
Bounce Rate – This graph displays the bounce rate for each day on the website over the selected time period. This traffic trend helps marketers and business users to immediately identify the potential spikes in the bounce rates, that might indicate a high volume of bot activities.
Average Session Duration Report
The Average Session Duration Report section in the Suspected Bot Activity Report displays the average session duration for each day for the most recent complete calendar month. The duration of a session can be an indicator of the bot's activities.
Daily Traffic Report
The Daily Traffic Report section in the Suspected Bot Activity Report displays the number of sessions for each day for the most recent complete calendar month. Irregular, inconsistent, and unpredictable changes in the number of sessions can be an indication of the bot's activities. The day with the highest number of sessions is considered suspicious and investigated in the following graphs.
First Page – Suspicious Date
This table displays the top landing pages for the day of the month that had the most and highest number of website visitors as indicated by the Daily Traffic Report. This table can help in approving or disapproving the suspicious activity of the bot. For example, if the first page is the landing page, and an advertisement or email campaign has been set for that page on that particular date then, it can explain the high traffic on the page that day. Hence, it can be considered that the visits to the website are from real users. Moreover, clicking on the column heading in the table will sort the results by that column.
Guest Info – Suspicious Day Traffic
This table displays the session data of the individual guests for the day of the month that had the highest number of website visitors as indicated by the Daily Traffic Report. This table can help in approving or disapproving the suspicious activity of the bot. It helps to investigate the specific guest profiles that may be suspected of being bots.
1. Search the guest's ref ID in the “Guest” tab to view the information about the guest.
2. Click on the column heading in the table to sort the results by that column. For example, it can be useful to sort the results by the session count as a guest with many sessions and a short period for the session has a higher chance of being a bot.
Bot Proportion – Past 6 Months
This graph displays a visualization of the percentage of the suspected bots in total website traffic for each of the past 6 months. It can help in quickly highlighting any changes in suspicious activity over time.
Bot % Split
This graph displays the proportion of each type of bot for all of the suspected bots for each of the past 6 months. It can track the following bot types:
1. Bounce Bots – These are the sessions that have only a one-page view and drop-off from the website.
2. Event Bots – These are the sessions with a relatively short time on the website and have a higher number of events. The typical activities for this bot type are rapidly moving through the website pages while scraping the information from the website.
3. Cart Bots – These are the sessions that have repetitive additions of multiple items to the cart but never complete the purchases.
Further details will be covered in the next blog. Stay tuned.