Anura PR Team
The best tools to protect against bot farm attacks are bot detection services that work in real-time and give you control over detection, redirects and blocking. Bot farm attacks are built to exploit weaknesses at scale to flood campaigns with bogus traffic, usually so fraudsters can either intentionally drain your budget or to test out information that they bought or stole on real, live lead forms. If you’re experiencing bot farm attacks, homegrown tactics aren’t enough to protect you and your metrics. Beyond draining spend, attacks inflate your metrics and lead to poor decision making down the road that makes the bleeding worse. Let’s look at each aspect of bot detection and prevention individually to break down why they matter.
Real-time Bot Detection
Real-time detection is important for a few reasons. One, if you only do post click analysis, you’ve already lost the spend that drove traffic and bots have already exploited your website. This means you have to live with whatever budget was wasted or damage that was caused, and you still have to fix the problem to prevent future pain. Two, you can only take real-time actions if you’re detecting in real-time. Real-time actions can be blocking, marking your CRM, or redirecting to other pages. The best practice for all of these methods has to happen in real-time to not only prevent the damage from attacks but to get the most accurate data. Fraud is a moving target, meaning that it constantly changes. If you are only relying on post click patterns or pre click blocking, you can miss new adaptations until it’s already too late.
Real-time detection can also be crucial if you have certain payment models. If you are either getting paid or paying cost per click, cost per lead, or on cost per metric, you burn more than money when you let bot attacks through. You burn the trust that your clients or your team have put into you. At the end of the day, something like IP blocking (an example of pre-click detection) and Lead Validation (an example of post click analysis) both leave a lot to be desired and leave you vulnerable to bot attacks. The tools that should be at the top of your consideration need to have an element of real-time detection.
Real-time Control
As discussed in the last section, real-time bot detection is crucial for real-time actions, which is ultimately the real reason you would purchase a detection tool. If you’re being attacked by bots, you want to stop the attack, not just detect it. Your tool should put you in the driver’s seat for dealing with bots, not just show you the amount.
Blocking
Blocking in real-time the best way to protect your pages and reputation. When bots are hitting your pages, you want to remove them from the equation. This will maintain accurate metrics, stop spam form fills, reduce risk of crashes and protect your content from scrapers with malicious intent. Blocking in real-time ensures the only people interacting with your digital content are real people, not our robot overlords.
Redirects
Sometimes blocking everything isn’t your best solution. If you suspect that bot attacks are a targeted effort specific to you or your brand, you may want to waste their resources or poison their data to deter future attacks. The thinking behind redirects is “the best defense is a good offense”. Wasting the aggressors’ resources by tying their bots up on slow redirect pages, which wastes computing power on the bot farm side, can discourage bad actors since it wastes their time and money, the opposite of what their goal is.
Marking in Your CRM
Sometimes letting bots through is a viable solution. Maybe instead of taking immediate action on the bot attacks, you want to understand the data and patterns of the attacks. Marking the bots as they come in without an immediate response on their end will ensure that the bot attacks stick to the same pattern (blocking them could trigger certain attacks, especially AI-enabled attacks, to change their behavior) and give you patterns to look for in the data later.
Accuracy
If you’re covered by real-time detection and actions, accuracy has to be near the top of your list. But what does accuracy mean? Does it mean that your tool always detects every bot? Short answer, no. While detecting the most bots possible is the goal, be skeptical of any tool with a 100% accuracy claim, simply because no tool catches everything. As we discussed above, fraud is always evolving, and there are scores of spammers and fraudsters who dedicate the majority of their time getting around security to make money. Inevitably some of them will get through even the most sophisticated solution.
So if complete detection isn’t the goal, then what is? No false positives. While detecting every single bot is impossible, detecting virtually every human shouldn’t be. Human detection is important because at the end of the day, if you’re paying for ads you’re trying to drive conversions from real people, so blocking even one person is as costly as letting bots in. The tool you choose should be like a digital bouncer, letting the right people in and keeping the wrong ones out. This is one of the reasons Anura has a 99.999% accuracy guarantee, because it’s the most crucial piece to any bot detection tool.
The Verdict
The best tool for stopping bot attacks on your paid digital marketing campaigns is the one with the lowest false positive rate, real-time detection and real-time control. Start by testing out various tools and judge the detection and statistics that they provide for yourself. Anura offers a two week free traffic quality audit to give you real data when deciding on a bot detection tool.
