Bot Traffic Benchmark: How do you stack up against your peers?

We are happy to introduce the latest addition to the DataDome dashboard: a bot traffic industry benchmark.

The benchmark feature is primarily intended for users who are still in their 30-day free trial period. When you install the DataDome module on your website and launch your free trial, you get instant access to a personalized dashboard where you can see all bot traffic to your website in real-time.

This dashboard now includes a graph that shows the current ratios of bad bot, commercial bot, and good bot traffic to your site, compared to an industry benchmark. The benchmark represents the average volumes of bad, commercial, and good bot traffic to all active DataDome customer accounts in your industry.

How bad is your bot problem?

The main benefit of the industry benchmark feature is to help you assess the potential impact of implementing a bot protection solution on your website. Seeing how your bot traffic compares to that of other e-commerce and classified ads businesses will provide you with valuable context when you evaluate the severity of automated threats to your website.

The industry benchmark KPI appears on the dashboard homepage for all accounts where the DataDome protection is not activated (mainly free trial accounts, which offer monitoring mode only).

When the protection is activated, the industry benchmark graph is replaced with a “Captchas passed” report. This KPI enables users to monitor the ratio of false positives (humans erroneously flagged as bots), which reflects DataDome’s detection accuracy. The false positive rate is currently below 0.01%: of 10,000 Capthcas displayed, only one is seen by a human.

Bot classification

If you are just starting to discover the DataDome dashboard, you may wonder what exactly is included in each of the three main categories of bots. Here is a quick overview.

Bad bots are bots with hidden identities and undisclosed intents. They come to your website for various purposes: content scraping, credential stuffing, inventory scalping, ad fraud … and often imitate human behavior so convincingly that it’s extremely difficult to distinguish them from your human visitors. Detecting the most sophisticated bad bots requires truly expert behavioral detection capabilities and artificial intelligence.

Commercial bots are operated by legitimate companies, usually for collecting and exploiting online content. These bots are transparent about their identity, but their activity may or may not be beneficial to your business. Before you activate the protection, bots from your marketing and technical partners will probably fall within this category, but so will bots that scrape your content for unapproved republishing, price comparisons, etc. Heavy commercial bot activity can drain your infrastructure resources and negatively impact your website performance.

Good bots add value or bring traffic to your website. This category includes search engines, social network providers, digital libraries, and various kinds of service providers. When you activate the DataDome protection, any manually allow-listed partners will also be included in the good bot category.

A final note on the DataDome dashboard:

The dashboard homepage gives a quick overview over the most important bot traffic KPIs. Depending on your subscription level, you can view bot traffic data from the last 7 or 30 days.

The Explore view provides more detailed data about the bots that come to your websites, mobile apps and APIs, classified along more than a dozen different dimensions. This enables you to perform detailed analyses of your bot traffic.

The DataDome bot protection solution runs on autopilot. Most of the time, our customers don’t need to spend any time on bot-related security issues at all. But should you want to customize or fine-tune the solution’s detection and response decisions, the dashboard also enables you to create your own custom rules. For example, you can define volume thresholds for partner bots, or show Captchas to all visitors (human and bots) from countries where you don’t do business.

Not a DataDome user yet? Start your free trial today!