What kinds of bots show up in site traffic

A kind of bot is the program’s purpose, not its appearance. The guides name few purposes. Anything a guide does not name stays out of the catalog.

How a program differs from a person, and why a person without JavaScript lands in the same row, is covered in bot or human. The job here is different: sort the purposes that are already named by the system that sees them, and refuse to mix them into one share.

Indexing, and checking that the site answers

The Metrica guide defines robots as programs that walk a site with a purpose. That definition names two purposes: to index pages, or to check that the site responds. It does not list others in that paragraph.

Both walks may introduce themselves with a User-agent string, and then Metrica files them in the Robots report under a name. They may also refuse to introduce themselves. How those two ways of catching them work, and why the behavior rules are not published, is in the same article on bot and human. The mechanics do not need a second telling.

For the advertising bill the consequence matters, not the machinery. A search crawl and an availability check are not a click on an ad. They raise the share of robots on the site and they do not enter Direct spend. The share people confuse with the bill is covered in robotness in Metrica.

A click on an ad is a different purpose

Direct describes a separate program. The antifraud guide counts, as fraud, clicks from bots and from fraudulent software: deliberate presses on ads. Google’s invalid-traffic guide calls the same thing non-human traffic: programs that imitate an ordinary browse in order to obtain a click or an impression.

This is not “a Metrica robot” under another name. The systems differ, and a visit can be a robot in one and an ordinary click in the other. The line at which a click becomes money is set in what ad click fraud is: you pay for what stayed in spend. A program Direct has already removed is not in that spend.

The guides do not describe how such a program is built. A catalog of tricks here would be an invention. The names “click bot” and “bot farm” are waiting for their own articles.

A person paid to click is not a kind of bot

Next to the programs, the Direct guide places motivated users: people who were paid to complete a task. The hand and the browser are real. This is not a fourth kind of robot and not a subspecies of click bot. Who pays, and why they want someone else’s spend, is covered in who clicks ads.

Mixing that row with robotness means looking for a program where a person is sitting at the account. The Robots report does not promise to show that person.

What this list does not contain

The three purposes above — indexing, an availability check, a click on an ad — are what the primary pages name outright. Price scraping, password guessing, buying up stock and farms are not given separate definitions on those pages. Until a guide or a study with a method exists, the kind is not declared.

The table does not say what percent is in your account. It says which window to open once the word “bot” has been said.

For the same day, open three numbers and do not add them. First the Robots report: the names that introduced themselves. That is indexing and availability, when the name says so. Do not subtract them from Direct spend, because they were never there. Then the Invalid traffic report: clicks Direct has already recognized. That is the second row of the table, not a continuation of the first. Then campaign spend and leads. Whatever remains here and was not in the two earlier windows is not named yet. It may be a person with a task, or a program the filter did not remove. Robotness does not assign it a kind.

The decision from those three windows is short. A high share in Robots, with empty invalid traffic and real leads, is not a reason to hunt for a new kind of bot: the spend did not come from that report. An empty Robots report next to clicks without leads names nothing either. Then look at spend and at whether Direct removed the click, instead of inventing a fourth purpose.

A check on the site looks at behavior, the browser environment, the network and the ad-click parameters. The decision is to let the visit through, to ask the browser to solve a short task, or to keep it out. If the check does not answer, the visit is let through. The check does not print a kind of bot, and it does not replace the Robots report. Binetro does not call a search robot a click on an ad, and it does not return money Direct has already charged.