What are skewed analytics and how to avoid them

Understanding skewed analytics
Problems with skewed analytics
Filters are not enough
HUMAN ensures accurate data
Related articles

What are skewed analytics?

Skewed analytics are the result of activity and interaction data of your web traffic that are erroneous due to a high volume of non-human traffic. Skewed analytics happens when bot-generated traffic is significant and is counted in with human activity, leading to erroneous conclusions and ultimately bad business decisions.

For example, a website owner needs to determine whether a certain campaign is driving web traffic or helping to convert web visitors into customers. Since bot traffic can account for 40 to 50 percent of traffic to a site, it can lead the website owner to make erroneous conclusions and over- or under-invest in a campaign as a result. To make sound decisions it is critical that analytics are not skewed or polluted by bot activity – good or bad.

Why are skewed analytics a problem?

When bots interact with your brand online, they inflate engagement metrics. Business leaders might erroneously conclude that certain site experiences and marketing campaigns are more effective than is really true. This could result in bad business decisions and wasted marketing spend.

Bots skew many KPIs and metrics, including user tracking and engagement, session duration, bounce rates, ad clicks, look-to-book ratios, campaign data and conversion funnel. For e-commerce, travel and media sites, unauthorized scraping bots mimic humans by dynamically checking listings, pricing and content resulting in skewed data.

As businesses continue to ramp up their online operations, digital marketing spend is also following suit. With bots often accounting for up to half of web traffic, losses from bad business decisions made due to skewed analytics can be significant, ranging from millions to a few billion dollars.

Why doesn’t filtering your analytics solve the problem?

Many marketing professionals are under the assumption that Google Analytics is filtering out bot traffic. Google Analytics is good at filtering SPAM and some crawlers, but today’s bots are far more sophisticated, and as a result, are not reliably handled by built-in capabilities.

Filtering out sessions within Google Analytics is a complex and time-consuming operation that can sometimes exclude good user traffic. Most companies do not recognize the problem and continue making decisions using polluted data.

How does HUMAN ensure accurate data?

HUMAN Data Contamination Defense filters out bot-generated from real human traffic. The solution uses behavioral fingerprinting and machine learning to separate bot from human traffic. By detecting and removing bot traffic from organic and paid data sources, Data Contamination Defense improves the quality of your marketing efforts and metrics, such as retargeting campaigns, product promotions, A/B testing, and conversion rates.

Data Contamination Defense seamlessly integrates with Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics to pass on the traffic identifications and provide clean custom reports. This enables you to make decisions about your marketing programs and budgets with confidence.