Thread: Bots or real human visitor?

Maybe this question sound silly.. but nevermind maybe some members here wanna know.

How can i know bots or real human visit my webpages?

if i got 50 visit/per day, is that all human or bots?

You know sometime people use software and the bots from that software can also reach our website. Can we differentiate between real human visitor and bots visitor?

GA excludes most bots from your visitor counts. If you go to your hosting company traffic logs you will see many visits from bots even if you are showing few visits in GA. There are some bots that emulate human visitors that may slip through Google's filters, though.

Google Analytics collects visitors information using Java script which are not used by bots. So the statistics shown by GA are exactly the count of human visitors.

I think you can check the bounce rate in google analytics. This will help you know which visitors are. I mean human or robots.

Originally Posted by Johnydarkdragon

I think you can check the bounce rate in google analytics. This will help you know which visitors are. I mean human or robots.

Bounce rate? so if the bounce rate is low is good or no good, so if it is the bots, they are not taking a long time while visiting our site isn't it

Bounce rate is an important metric, but not because it tells you anything about bot traffic. As Hogward pointed out most bot traffic does not even get included in GA. I do believe there are some scripts that actually open the page in a browser and make some form entries to bypass bot traps, but these are relatively few and probably do not visit most websites.

The thing that bounce rate does tell you is how sticky your site is and can indicate how well you have done your keyword research. The lower the bounce rate and the higher the time on site the better. A high bounce rate with no time spent on the site is bad as it tells Google that people found nothing of interest on the page. A bounce is when someone visits only one page on a site. The time on page/site is the rest of the story. It is possible to have a high bounce rate, but the visitors spend enough time on the site to read the content. This could even be considered a good thing as it would indicate that the visitor found exactly what they were looking for on the page.

If you have access to your cpanel you should be able to see the visitors to your site which will tell you the bots, and the actual visitors or human visitors. If you don't have access to this information request for you hosting provider to give it to you. Sometime they will block it for unforeseen reasons.

Originally Posted by deepsand

If you have access to your cpanel you should be able to see the visitors to your site which will tell you the bots, and the actual visitors or human visitors. If you don't have access to this information request for you hosting provider to give it to you. Sometime they will block it for unforeseen reasons.

Sometimes i just wonder, how do they differentiate between actual/human visitors and bot visitors, i just think it is similar when you click the mouse with your own fingers so as to enter the website rather than you ask the software to click for you

There are few things you can verify.

1) referrers, An empty referrer is an indication that, a legit user hitting the page by entering the url in address bar. But Mostly bots dont use referrers to visit the pages.
2) if you can see unusual visit of several pages with in your site in less than few seconds. then this could be a bot visit.
3) dont look at the useragents of the visit, it is quite easy to exploit.

But there is no 100% way to identify a bot by looking at the logs if the bot is intended to hide itself.

great explanation from vbreader! with lots of new tools and software nowadays, sometime i got confuse between real visitors and bot, some 'clever dudes' invent and reinvent new software everyday that purposely using bots to visit our website