Rant: Our analytics tool counted a bot as our best customer for 6 months

Found out last week that a scraping bot from a VPN server hit our site 4,000 times and the dashboard flagged it as a returning VIP. We built a whole retargeting campaign around that fake persona. Has anyone else caught their reporting showing nonsense that looked totally normal?

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julia8432mo ago

and honestly that bot might have been your best customer anyway. it engaged with your site more than any real human did, clicked through whatever you tracked, and gave you 4000 data points to build from. the retargeting campaign was probably better because you actually had a clear picture of what this persona wanted, even if it was fake. look at it this way, if a human had done that youd be bragging about it internally. the real problem here isnt that the bot fooled you, its that your reporting cant tell the difference between a bot and a person, which means every other metric youve got is probably junk too but nobody noticed because the numbers looked fine. so maybe the bot did you a favor by exposing how shallow your whole analytics setup really is before you spent real money on worse guesses.

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