Introducing User Agent Tracking

[Ryan Johnson]

Half of all web traffic is bots. Now what?​

When you look at your traffic numbers, how many of those visitors are actually real people?

More than half of all traffic on the internet today is bots. And that number is climbing. These bots probably aren’t hacking your site or stealing your data. They are, however, quietly messing with your marketing numbers.

Bots don’t buy. But they still pad your visitor counts, your page views, and sometimes even your lead counts. (Plenty of bots are perfectly happy to fill out a form.)

This is a real problem. Almost every business makes budget and channel decisions based on top of funnel metrics. If bots are quietly skewing those numbers, every decision you stack on top of them inherits the same problem. Pick the wrong channel to scale because the traffic looked good…and you might be funding a bot magnet for months.

When we checked this at SegMetrics, our bot-to-human ratio was about 1 in 5. That means 20% of our TOFU traffic was bots!

Introducing User Agent Tracking​

Starting today, SegMetrics separates bots from real humans across your entire funnel.

With User Agent Tracking, you can see your own bot-to-human ratio. You can also break down your traffic by device type, operating system, and browser — and then filter it, segment it, or build reports around any of it.

Bottom line: “How many visitors did I get?” is the wrong question. “How many people?” is the one that actually moves money. Our User Agent Tracking lets you identify the humans in your funnel — and how they’re navigating your site.

See User Agent Tracking in action…

See who’s really there​

Here are two checks to run against your own traffic this week. Each just takes a minute, but the answer could totally change your marketing strategy and budgeting.

1. Are your channels even real?​

Before you crown a channel as your best performer, look at its bot-to-human split.

A channel that looks great on visitor count can tell a very different story once you strip the bots out. As in, same spend but half the actual people. You can’t optimize a metric that’s half fiction. So start by getting the truth.

2. Desktop vs. mobile on your conversion pages​

Look at device type specifically on the pages where it counts: signup, webinar registration, checkout.

A lot of us still design for desktop first, even knowing better — which means the mobile experience on your highest-stakes pages might be worse than you think. If a chunk of your traffic is hitting that signup page on mobile and bouncing, you’re paying to send people somewhere that wasn’t built for them. This device breakdown is critical for advanced conversion optimization.

Try User Agent Tracking for yourself​

Find out what your bot-to-human ratio is today.

Start your 14-day free trial today.

Data beats opinion.