amazonaws traffic under direct traffic

[roohnair18]

Hi for the year 2023 we are seeing a higher traffic from Direct Marketing channel YoY and YTD as well. most the traffic 30% or more are marked under amazonaws.com.

We do use amazon for display ads thus we did not bother much, however I feel these could be bot traffic.

Any idea how to investigate this further to substantiate that this is bot traffic

[Jennifer_Dungan]

This sounds like Bot traffic to be honest.. a lot of people will use Amazon to run their bots, then the IP addresses are coming from Amazon IPs rather than their own....

But, you could try using testing tools (Cloud Debugger, Omnibug, etc) and follow the flow through your ad server and see if that is the referrer you get.

[roohnair18]

Thanks Jennifer for getting back, the information on Omnibug and the ad server testing is new to me. could you share some documentation on this ?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

I don't really have any documentation... but both Omnibug and Adobe's Cloud Debugger will show you what is being collected on each tracking call...

Adobe's Cloud Debugger, if you log in, can also show you the post processed values, so that might be better for this case...

Install https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adobe-experience-platform/bfnnokhpnncpkdmbokanobigaccjkpob

onto Chrome...

When you open it, it will detect and show each tracking hit, you can log into your Analytics account (top right), and then there should be an option to show "Post Processed Values".. this will show a second column (next to the one that was detected) that after a little time will show extra values based on processing.

Now, if you click on your ads (going back to your site) you should be able to see what the referrer looks like, and I think you should see your Marketing Channel values?

[roohnair18]

Thanks another question. if aws is bot traffic can the admin exclude this going forward? I do not have admin or tagging access but before I advise on this would like to inform my team on the same.

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Yes.. though it depends on how the traffic registers... you can add custom Bot Rules to your report suite... but depending on that data, the indicators may not exist to use the rules available...

However, one of the tricks I use to get rid of issues when say a bad release goes out and causes double (or more) tracking (i.e. a few years ago there was a release that caused an infinite reload for anyone on an iPad - oops), but I created a virtual suite called "{suite name} (Clean Data)" and I used a segment to try and remove to the best of my ability issues where we have over-counted data.... I had to transition all my reports over to use the "Clean" suite... but IF the AWS traffic can't be removed as a bot, you can certainly create a segment to exclude it, and use a Virtual Report Suite applying that new exclusion rule.

[roohnair18]

Thanks Jennifer this helps, let me get back to my team with this

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You're welcome