How to Tell if Web Traffic is Genuine or Not

Driving heavy web traffic is important for any digital marketer. That’s why a lot of organizations buy website traffic. It helps any organization fulfill their digital marketing objectives, whether it is for increasing awareness or for driving profit.

In order to fully realize digital marketing objectives, two things must happen. First, brand messages should be properly conveyed to its intended online audiences. Second, online users should be driven to take action.

Driving traffic to your digital marketing initiatives is the first step in realizing these objectives. However, some digital marketers think that if they buy website traffic, then that’s enough. It’s not. For you to truly achieve your goals, you need to focus on driving a lot of qualified traffic towards your website. Qualified traffic comes from genuine online users. Your digital marketing campaigns cannot succeed if proxy traffic is driven to your website.

Furthermore, proxy traffic renders websites vulnerable to malware attacks. It also earns websites a bad reputation and negatively affect their appearance in online search results. Because of these consequences, you also need to be on the lookout for proxy traffic delivered by bots. Proxy traffic affects digital marketers who buy website traffic, as well as those who do not.

Despite software upgrades that filter out bots from your system, it’s important for you to know which metrics determine the authenticity and quality of website traffic to ensure to realize your digital marketing objectives.

Here are the metrics that you need to look at so you can tell if you’re getting genuine website traffic or not:

1. Volume of Web Traffic
If the volume of traffic to your website increases suddenly and exponentially, then there’s a high likelihood that proxy website traffic is being driven to it.

2. Bounce Rate
Google Analytics defines bounce rate as the time online users visits and leaves your website. Genuine traffic comes from online users who spend a minute or two in their website visits. Proxy traffic browses content and leaves the website in seconds, hence creating higher bounce rates. Getting unusually high bounce rates is an indication of proxy traffic on your website.

3. Browsing Session Duration
This refers to the duration spent by an online user browsing a website. Genuine online users spend a few minutes browsing websites. Bots driven by proxy traffic only browse for a few seconds.

4. Geographic location
This applies to websites targeting certain locations. If your website’s intended audience is located in Australia, then genuine website traffic must come from Australia and probably New Zealand. However, if your traffic comes from a faraway country, then that may be proxy traffic.

5. Online Browser
Heavy website traffic coming from one online browser is dubious. On the other hand, getting website traffic from a wider variety of online browsers means that you’re attracting genuine users.

Digital marketing can only be successful if you can carry it out with proxies and malware. So if you need to perform necessary system upgrades, then by all means, do it.