HUGE spike in direct/bouncing traffic

[devanm60563341]

Hi - we are experiencing a huge increase in traffic from ~20 IPs, all with over 3000 visits in the past week. Our normal "direct" source hit counts are around 5k - this past week we soared over 130k. Every week I check a data warehouse report that shows me visits by IP and I block any weird ones in the bot rules. However, this is an extremely large number and I'm concerned about what is happening. Adobe support is telling me I need to set up VISTA rules but I'm not sure what is going on. Does anyone have experience with this issue or have suggestions on what could be happening?

[PratheepArunRaj]

Dear Devan,

Sorry, not sure why VISTA Rule is needed here? Any you give us some more background on Adobe's suggestion on VISTA rules?

Thank You!

Arun

[devanm60563341]

Hi Arun,

When I've pointed out the traffic that is a HUGE spike and bouncing at 100% and all from a handful of IP addresses, Adobe is suggesting it is bots  and I should filter out the traffic. I can't keep up with bot rules (there are SO many coming in each week) that they suggested VISTA rules.

I'm trying to understand the cause of the spike and what can be done to prevent it - I'm not familiar with bot-type activity best practices!

[Andrey_Osadchuk · Accepted solution]

Hi devanm60563341,

Have you already enabled IAB bot filtering rules and they did not help?

Consider the following approach if you are happy with a regular manual review of Bot traffic:  Advance Your Bot Filtering Powers | Adobe Blog

[PratheepArunRaj]

Dear Devan,

Fine. Either we need to include the list of IP Address in Bot Rule or Adobe has to exclude by VISTA rules.

But it think even for Adobe, they need to figure out the Bots. So there should be some way to find those bots, i am curios on how would they setup VISTA.

Have you tried RegEx to exclude the set of IPs?

Thank You!

Arun

[devanm60563341]

Yes, those are on and have been since we first started using Adobe.

I also have at least 30 custom bot rules defined to filter out traffic that was 100% bounce in weird spikes from months past.

[devanm60563341]

I am using Adobe Bot rules -- filtering by IP address for bots that I identified by getting a datawarehouse report of visits/pageviews by IP address PratheepArunRaj​

[PratheepArunRaj]

Dear Devan,

Sorry, I am afraid that if there were any other better solution than the current.

Thank You!

Arun

[Urs_Boller]

can you see any other "common attributes" for those bounces? we once had a similar case and figured out they where all coming with a certain "user agent" (very unusual combination in our case). this allowed us to set the filter on those criteria (apart from IP where you are always too late...)

[devanm60563341]

How did you get the user agent? That field is not available to me in data warehouse!

[Ankit_Sharma_]

devanm60563341​ You can get the UserAgent through Data feed as that's the only option, UserAgent is not available through reports or DWH.

Or you can use eVar to capture the UserAgent in reporting and leverage that but it has it's own advantage / disadvantage, viz. due to the monthly limit of unique value a variable can hold you end up exhausting that limit and some UserAgent values end up getting into the low traffic line items. but you can definitely use that approach to see the UserAgent value in reporting.

or you can data feed as mentioned above.

[Urs_Boller]

I have setup a processing rule to copy "userAgent" to my desired prop. since I'm looking for "spikes" with a lot of volume I don't care about "low traffic".

apart from that, you can use the default dimensions like "browser" or "operating system" to segment out certain traffic.

but all this does not prevent the hits from reaching your report suite, it just helps to clean the data...

[jantzen_b]

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