Step 1: IP Addresses and Bot Traffic

Yext Analytics uses IP Address as a way to identify visitors, without Cookies, for the purposes of identifying a general user location (e.g. Brooklyn, New York), traffic type and / or bot traffic.

Understanding Bot Traffic

Bot traffic constitutes any traffic that is derived from any non-human, automated, activity.

Bot traffic is important to customers and Yext for a few reasons:

Analytics: Bot traffic can distort Analytics data leading customers to draw incorrect conclusions from their data.
Cost: Despite not being real users, Customers can still incur a cost from receiving bot traffic as it can impact their usage costs if not properly detected.
Service: Bot traffic can negatively impact service for Yext’s products particularly from malicious users (e.g., DDoS attack)

There are two ways we can detect Bot Traffic:

User Agent: User Agent indicates what type of browser / device combination is accessing our network. Non-malicious Bots or Scrapers (think Google Indexing Scraper) will typically identify themselves by User Agent so they can be excluded from Analytics (AdsBot-Google (+http://www.google.com/adsbot.html))
IP Address: While User Agent is effective for non-malicious users, malicious users trying to commit a DDoS attack or scrape data for some other reason will typically not identify themselves. This is where IP Address is helpful because it allows us to isolate requests from a “user”.

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