Adwords Bot Issue

Too many hits

[deep_alley]

Hi,

Just wanted to know if anyone is having issues with the adwords bot hitting their pages too often.

I have a campaign that generated that more bot clicks than it did valid clicks. It is totally ridiculous. If there had been a smaller server in place, the website would have crashed.

Anyone else seeing crazy bot activity?

Also does anyone know how the bot actually works? How many times a day would it visit pages? Does it check all keywords at one go? Do these keyword checking bot visits happen everyday?

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[Zealot]

I might be missing something but can you pls clarify what you mean by "adwords bot" and how do you determine and measure the "bot clicks"?

[LifeinAsia]

adwords bot is the bot that checks your AdWords link and the content (and quality of the content) on the landing page. It periodically comes back to see if the content has changed.

We've also seen a lot of bot traffic.

[inbound]

We get hit constantly by these bots (Google, Yahoo and MSN), it is a bit of a pain when they request tens of thousands of pages a day each but it's part of the deal.

Any decent server should be able to handle the load they put on you (given that we have millions of unique landing pages when you add up the 3 networks). If your pages are particularly processor intensive then it may become an issue I suppose, but that means you should be looking at:

* Cutting non-performing adverts
* Improving the efficiency of your scripts
* Investing in better hardware (Hint: Solid State Hard Drives rock for fairly static data)

It's not only the advert bots that you have to consider, investing in improving delivery speed will benefit your visitors and probably increase your revenues (and make it easier to cope with a combination of Visitors, Ad Bots, SE Spidering, Bad Bots etc).

[Zealot]

That is very interesting. Can you pls let me know how you recognise the bot - ip/useragent? I understand that such visits would be filtered in the adwords reports but it would make sense to also filter them in any log processing package and track them separately if necessary.

Many Thanks,

Zealot

[inbound]

It can be the case that the bot that is used for advert landing pages is the same as the search engine spider (e.g. Yahoo), we separate the two by having a non-spiderable structure to our unique advert landing pages (orphaned so we know they should be being requested as a result of landing page checking).

The two most voracious are:

Google
AdsBot-Google (+http://www.google.com/adsbot.html)

Yahoo
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; [help.yahoo.com...]

For some reason MSN hasn't shown up today so perhaps someone can fill in what MSN are using (sorry, the logfiles are VERY big).

[deep_alley]

Thanks for the suggestions inbound.

But our bot hits seem highly abnormal. For instance the day we started the campaign we got thousands of hits - 5 digit number. The website in question already gets a lot of traffic and we were actually shocked that it went down.

The other very strange thing we noticed was that even when the campaign was totally paused we got bot hits to the pages the next day too. Not a single word was active, not a single change was made in the account.