Question on how to test Bot traffic in QA environment

[LawrenceLuo]

We are looking to use the Adobe IAB bot rule to block bot traffic to our site, but we want to first test out the change in QA environment to see if there is any impact on the site (performance, conversion etc) before applying it to the production suite.

Does anyone has any experience/knowledge on how we can generate/mimic bot traffic in QA suite, in order to test the bot rule?

[yuhuisg · Accepted solution]

I don't think you'll be able to test it out sufficiently in a closed environment like dev/QA sites, because those sites are usually not accessible to the public, and bots can really only target publicly accessible environments.

Also, take a look at the articles on this topic at https://lukas-oldenburg.medium.com/bots-analytics-common-failing-approaches-to-bot-filtering-incl-ai....

[Khurshid_Alam]

You may create a separate report suite for QA and add the report suite in exiting Launch property. This will allow the same hits to be passed to the qa report suite which will have updated IAB settings. This way you review the effect of the bot rules in the reports.

[LawrenceLuo]

Thanks Khurshid!  However we are not using Launch as tag management, do you know if there is a workaround without Launch?