Possible bot traffic Sept 2024

[ctro]

Is anyone else seeing a jump in visits from a possible bot? In one week, we jumped from 2 million to 3 million visits, which is unusual outside of November.

These million visits have no referring domain, multiple user agents, multiple IP addresses, no corresponding orders and most of them bounce after the first page. Almost all are mobile devices but not a specific browser, device, or operating system. It's not tied to a specific geo-location.

We know it's bogus, but we can't block it in our usual ways.

Does anyone have any other ideas of how to identify and block this traffic?

[bjoern__koth]

Sounds like a crawler indeed.

And the user agent string does not contain anything identifying the crawler's name?

If you look at browser versions, do they seem old? Sometimes it's worthwhile checking when specific browser versions were released e.g., everthing < Chrome version 100 can for sure be considered a bot.

Also, do you see this traffic coming from one specific Operating System like Linux?

[ctro]

No particular Operating System.

The odd thing is that our internal tracking doesn't show this spike and neither does the session replay product we use. It's only showing up in Adobe traffic.

I'm reaching out to our rep to see if they have any insights.

[bjoern__koth]

Maybe your other solutions properly identify this as bot.

But as mentioned, you can also add these manually on the bot list if they look dodgy.

[toddc2546979]

This traffic is all coming in on old Chrome Mobile browsers. The question is, why is it not being filtered out from the Adobe reporting? 

[bjoern__koth]

Well, because old browsers are not necessarily automatically landing on bot lists just because they are old.

But if you know it's the same browser, you can at least act on them

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/analytics/admin/admin-tools/manage-report-suites/edit-rep...

[Krishna_Musku]

Agree with @bjoern__koth

@ctro Also, do you have Bot Rules enabled for your report suite? These are default to IAB rules. But you can add custom rules specific to your needs.

[ctro]

Yes, we have that enabled and we have added a few user agents and IP addresses to the exclusion list.

Thanks!

[Amruthesh_AG]

We also faced same issue and then raised a case with adobe to know the IP address.

Adobe has provided the IP address. Based on IP range i have updated IAB bot rule.

After that I never faced this issue.

[Meghan_Powers]

We are also facing this problem and have identified the vast majority of the traffic in these criteria:

• Mobile device = 
  • Google Pixel 2 9G011A)
    • or
  • Sprint Galaxy S5 (SM-G900P)
    • or
  • Google Nexus 5 (D820)
• OR Mobile Device = Apple iPhone WITH operating system = iOS 11.0

We also tacked onto the segment AND last touch channel = direct OR Internal URL's but that may be unique to our setup.

For now, we've put an annotation in adobe analytics to use that segment we set up (and we set up an include and exclude segment).

@Amruthesh_AG , what did you include in your request to adobe to send the IP's?

[Amruthesh_AG]

@Meghan_Powers  I have found out the bot traffic root cause(non business region with specific date range) and raised a support ticket with adobe to provide the IP address along with date range and browser details.

Adobe has checked in there data warehouse provide the details in excel format