Why is bot filtering important? 

An essential part of measuring marketing impact in general and specifically in Folloze, is ensuring that this data is accurate and authentic. When measuring impact, modern digital marketers face the challenge of non-human visitor traffic, typically referred to as “bots” (robots). 

Bots are non-human traffic that visit your website or app. Although not all bots are harmful and may arrive to perform automated tasks, they can provide an inaccurate presentation of data. 

To help in bot detection, Folloze has implemented the Akamai Bot Manager, a bot filtering service which gives you full visibility and control on your data, allowing you to detect unknown bots and non-human activity. The bot filtering capability provides you with accurate and reliable analytics on your visitors’ activity and board performance. 

To learn more about the Akamai service, visit this page: https://www.akamai.com/products/bot-manager. 

When is bot filtering useful? 

If you use inbound motions, such as ad campaigns to drive traffic to your boards, bot filtering is relevant to you.

For inbound activities, you cannot always control traffic which can include bots as visitors, and thereby making traffic seem higher due to non-human activity. When sending an ad campaign, the ad network shares the data with other affiliated networks and those other networks may visit the page for verification or scanning. In such cases, it is important to be able to identify and filter out suspected bot visitors from your reporting. This provides your team with real and accurate performance reports, and allows you to make more informed decisions.

Folloze bot filtering 

Folloze applies Bot detection and filtering at every level, from a single board’s Pulse Tab to the Report Center reports and Account Engagement Dashboard. 

In the Pulse table, a new column is added for ‘Human/ Suspected Bot’. You have the option to filter the column accordingly.  

In the Report Center, you can filter any report by ‘Human/ Suspected Bot’, which will exclude the lead and their engagement activity to provide clean data. 

Before you begin

To enable this feature in your account, contact your customer success representative. 

Filtering analytics data in the Pulse table

You can filter the analytics data in the Pulse table to identify if a lead is a human or suspected bot. 

1. Go to the board for which you wish to retrieve analytics data. You need to be an Owner, Editor, or Subscriber of the board to view the analytics.
2. On the left navigation bar, click on the Pulse tab. 
3. Under Human/Bot, use the filter to view human, suspected bot or all traffic to your board.  

Filtering the Report Center

You can filter the Report Center to identify human or suspected bot traffic to your boards and exclude the lead and their engagement activity to provide clean data. 

1. To download a report on a board, go to the board for which you wish to get information. 
2. Go to Reporting > Report Center. 
3. Choose a report template. 
4. To open the Filters dialog, click Open Template. 
5. Use the Human/Bot filter to identify human or suspected bot traffic to the board. 

Keep in mind that the Item Card Views includes all humans and bots (gives a total number of both). To know how many of the views are actual humans, you need to go to pulse and filter to see only humans.