There’s one word most marketers don’t want to hear. It’s four letters long. And, on the off times it is uttered, it brings disgust to almost everyone in the room.

The word, of course, is bots.

The disgust reaction is completely rational. When most marketers think of bots they think of non-humans clicking on their ads. Driving up their ad spend. And taking away the opportunity for real people to see products they would like to buy.

These bots do exist of course. They’re the reason that LotLinx, Google, and other responsible advertising networks take a lot of proactive steps using both machine learning and human review to make sure that we don’t charge for any traffic that we don’t think is human.

But there’s another side of the coin, and that sometimes shows up in your Google Analytics reports.  These are, for lack of a better word, friendly bots.

These are computers visiting your site, often from advertising providers or agencies, looking to optimize the connection between your landing page and the ads you’re running. This is done to improve the user experience, and you aren’t charged for the visit.

If you think you’re being charged for some bot visits to your site, we would be happy to use our team of experts to take a closer look. Just give us a call at 800-625-5469 or submit a contact request to have your Google Analytics checked for bots – free of charge.