How can I prevent bot clicks from overwhelming my B2B website after sending emails?
Summary
What email marketers say11Marketer opinions
Email marketer from LinkedIn suggests validating user input can prevent bots from submitting malicious data and overloading your system.
Email marketer from Reddit suggests using CAPTCHA to differentiate between human and bot traffic, ensuring that only legitimate users can access certain parts of your website.
Email marketer from Webmaster Forum explains that you can block known bot user agents in your server configuration to prevent them from accessing your site.
Email marketer from BizReport explains implementing click fraud detection tools can help identify and filter out invalid clicks generated by bots.
Email marketer from MarketingProfs suggests using honeypots (e.g., hidden form fields) to trap bots. Bots will fill these fields, allowing you to identify and filter them, thus preventing them from causing harm to your website.
Email marketer from Neil Patel's Blog explains that you should identify bot traffic using tools like Google Analytics and then filter them out to prevent skewed data and potential website overload.
Email marketer from Email Geeks suggests redirecting bots to less performant hosting based on IP address.
Email marketer from Quora explains you should delay the loading of critical page elements using Javascript. Real users will execute this script, while simple bots may not, offering some protection.
Email marketer from Medium explains that it is important to limit request rates from the same IP address can prevent bots from overwhelming the server.
Email marketer from Email Geeks recommends using Cloudflare to add a Managed Challenge if requests from a particular IP hit a threshold (e.g., 100 per hour) to halt bot traffic while allowing real humans through and suggests isolating and rate limiting the problematic ASN if Andrew had Cloudflare.
Email marketer from DigitalOcean says that implementing a robots.txt file to block well-behaved bots can prevent them from accessing certain parts of your website, reducing server load.
What the experts say8Expert opinions
Expert from Email Geeks advises to make solving the website overload a web developer problem by making the page load cheaper or improving servers.
Expert from Email Geeks suggests using protection like CloudFlare in front of the website.
Expert from Email Geeks suggests sending fewer emails, fewer links per email, or suppressing domains known to attack back.
Expert from Word to the Wise answers suggests monitoring referral traffic for unusual patterns as part of a strategy to prevent your website from being overwhelmed.
Expert from SpamResource explains that using advanced filtering techniques that analyze click behavior and engagement metrics can help to identify and filter bot traffic to prevent website overload.
Expert from Email Geeks suggests that if the website can’t handle the spike in traffic a temporary fix would be to link to cheaper pages, or to send slower, while the longer term solution is to fix the website.
Expert from Email Geeks warns that blocking bots may impact deliverability, as they check if the sent content is benign and suggests using progressive enhancement to serve different content to real browsers.
Expert from Email Geeks warns against blocking legitimate bot traffic long-term, as it can cause deliverability issues, and reiterates that fixing the website is the ideal solution.
What the documentation says6Technical articles
Documentation from Akamai explains bot management solutions identify, categorize, and manage bots to prevent malicious activity and protect web resources.
Documentation from Sucuri explains that implementing a Web Application Firewall (WAF) can help identify and block malicious bots before they reach your website, preventing overload and protecting your site's resources.
Documentation from Imperva shares how to leverage advanced bot detection techniques like behavioral analysis to identify and block sophisticated bots.
Documentation from Cloudflare explains that Rate Limiting can be configured to protect against bot traffic spikes by setting thresholds for requests per IP address or other criteria, thus preventing website overload.
Documentation from Amazon Web Services explains that using AWS Shield can help protect your website from DDoS attacks, which often involve bot traffic.
Documentation from Stack Overflow explains that analysing server logs for unusual patterns (e.g., rapid requests from the same IP) can help identify bot traffic and implement rules to block or rate limit them.