Skewed analytics can result in hampering the marketing team initiatives as well as organizations witnessing a considerable loss.
As per the bot detection and mitigation firm, Netacea, organizations are struggling to cope with the cost caused by skewed analytics just as much as click fraud, even though click fraud has a bigger profile. The report, “The Bot Management Review: How Are Bots Skewing Marketing Analytics?” observed that 440 organizations across the travel, eCommerce, financial services, entertainment, and telecom industries based in the US and the UK found that skewed analytics resulted in businesses losing an average of 4.07% loss in revenue for about 68%. On the other hand click fraud or ad fraud affected 73% of the overall businesses resulting in them losing 4% of the revenue. While the organizations damaged by skewed analytics are slightly smaller when compared to ad fraud the effects are much drastic for them. For large-scale enterprises (25%) with annual revenue north of US $7 billion, 4.07% is US$284,900,000 per year. This highlights the immense opportunity for threat actors to proliferate in their field effectively.
Hackers use bots to buy certain goods before other customers, compromise accounts, inspect the validity of stolen card details as well as content or prices by bulk scraping. However, even if they do not directly contribute to damaging the product or platforms, bots are able to skew data that makes marketing teams make bad decisions. Not only that, but skewed analytics can hide what real customers are doing, making it impossible to target the right audience.
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“Skewed website traffic analytics is a side effect of bot activity that is often overlooked,” says Andy Still, CTO, Netacea. He adds, “Many organizations are so focused on trying to stop what bots are doing, that they forget about the impact unwanted traffic can have on the data they use to make both marketing and business decisions.”
As per Juniper Research’s “Future Digital Advertising” ad fraud will cost US $ 42 billion every year across the globe. Furthermore, the number is only set to rise to 2023. Netacea’s research revealed that skewed analytics is a problem of a similar nature.
The report found that most organizations base at least a quarter of their marketing and other business decisions on analytics that are vulnerable to being skewed by the bots. Not only that, over half of the organizations have run special promotions (54%), “burned through” a marketing budget (55%) or ordered new stock (55%) due to incorrect data caused by the bots. Additionally, the report found that most organizations think that DDoS protection (71%) and Web Application Firewalls (73%) will prevent bots that, in fact, are ineffective against these specific attacks.
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While the cybersecurity team is responsible for protecting websites from attacks, the bot activity launched is likely to have a drastic impact on the marketing team. Skewed analytics can negatively affect their decision-making as well as effectiveness. To effectively deal with them, the security teams should collaborate with marketing teams to ensure that they have security solutions in place that prevent them from bot attacks.
“They need to start analyzing their data in more detail. If traffic activity looks unusual, it should be validated against real user behavior using appropriate tooling. This will equip businesses to better understand what’s happening before making big marketing and merchandising decisions,” adds Andy Still.
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