Fighting the Good Fight: Understanding Sophisticated Bots in Fund Marketing
Maintaining a popular presence on the internet is crucial to boost engagement with investors. It’s an essential playground for digital marketing: you promote your brand on websites, ads, and social media, share insights you find valuable, and draw in interest that could lead to new business.
But the web is essentially a World Wide Wild West. Threats are both lying in plain sight and hidden, trying to disrupt all the good-natured collaborative use of the online frontier, including ruining engagement stats designed to level the competitive playing field.
Bots are automated visitors to websites and apps, sent from a piece of software to perform a task. They are a tricky conundrum for marketers as they can be beneficial or malevolent, and takes some technical knowledge and tools to oust the malicious actors..
The average bad bot activity is gaining steadily, now accounting for around 32% of traffic, with financial services in the top three most inundated industries. Here’s which bots to look out for, why it matters for marketers, and how to go about building fortifications.
Understanding The Good Kind
The key factor about bots is that they are not human, albeit working on behalf of real people. Their harmful purposes are usually distinctly inhuman at face value, yet still, greater digital capabilities are blurring the lines to make even legitimate human behaviour uncanny.
Good bots carry out tasks that help the web function properly, like when users search keywords to find what they need. Web crawlers (at least authorised ones such as Google or Bing) scan through website content to make sure they are highly visible in search engine rankings according to relevance. Aggregators make sure user’s personalised feeds are filled with the right content from news sites.
Social media platforms use automated bots to recommend trends, gauge sentiment or send notifications. Website bots can also monitor site speed, performance, and security while developers use bots for quality testing and debugging within site and app environments, as do ethical hackers and cybersecurity experts. Not all good bots are fully beneficial, but marketers are able to limit their crawl rates, divert them elsewhere or block access to ultimately optimise the places where they are needed.
Why Bad Bots Matter to Fund Marketers
Bad bot traffic ranges in its potential extremity to a fund website. Spambots target online forms while large numbers of unauthorised crawlers can affect website traffic statistics. Likewise, ‘click fraud’ artificially boosts an advertisers’ metrics by spamming pay-per-click ads and distorts sector competition. Spending on PPC, in turn, gets automatically compromised here which can pull the plug on marketing budgets and ruin ROI efforts. False engagement data misguides strategic campaign decisions too, fostering a vicious cycle of ill-advised marketing.
Malicious scrapers can spy or harvest yours or competitors’ content leading to unethical plagiarism and reputation damage. Going one stage further, bots may steal business or site visitors’ personal information, financial data or intellectual property, hugely dangerous in wrecking compliance efforts within the financial world’s strict regulations. Vulnerability scanning targets site and API weaknesses to distribute malware that threatens security.
Similarly, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can overwhelm servers and crash services during data breaches, but also consume bandwidth, slowing speeds and shoot up hosting prices. Server responses to HTTP requests (good and bad) raises carbon emissions exponentially, which is very poor in regards to curating a greener web overall considering the mammoth number of server requests each day.
Detection Know-How
Depending on the threat levels posed by bots and what marketing activities they are affecting, there are a number of ways to identify them, whether using Google Analytics, custom dashboards in marketing platforms, or third party software.
Analysing Web Page Metrics
Bad bots can visit pages, not click a single thing, then leave repeatedly. This ‘high bounce rate’ is indicative of this, especially on single pages.
Session duration (the amount of time a user browses a page) can either be strangely low or erratically high, both ways more excessive than human actions.
Mouse movements may also not be natural – specific tools can test these.
Scanning Bot Data
Conversation may be spam or junk, shown through suspicious fake names, numbers and email addresses.
High traffic from one specific region may be suspect.
Bots can be prone to switching between geolocations often.
Platforms such as Akamai allow marketers to compare IPs against bot or proxy lists.
You can set thresholds for IP or user requests which, when exceeded, may indicate they are malicious and need to be blocked.
Proving Humanity
Encryption or two-factor authentication (especially for portals or centres containing sensitive data) can safeguard against bots.
CAPTCHAs can be installed to separate typical human behaviours from bots.
Marketers can trick bots using website links or forms that are invisible to normal users.
Machine learning models can learn historical patterns of behaviour and easily spot and flag anomalies.
Essential Further Safeguards
Log analysis tools can collect data from various sources and indicate threats levels.
Implementing a firewall filters network traffic according to security protocols, including AWS’ Web Application Firewall (WAF).
Advanced bot management services are also available, such as Cloudflare.
It goes without saying that cybersecurity trends, especially in relation to financial services, are always iterating. It’s best to keep marketing teams and wider firms in the know about potential threats to stay one step ahead, all before the bots undo all the hard work digital marketing campaigns do to reach investors and boost AuM.
ProFundCom has developed a set of qualitative and quantitative methods to halt bot traffic. Speak to our team to learn more!
