There are both good and bad bots in digital programmatic advertising. Good bots declare themselves honestly; that is, they say their name honestly in the USER_AGENT. Bad bots pretend to be normal browsers like Internet Explored, Chrome, Safari in order to evade detection.

1. January 2017 / Page 0marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
linkedin.com/in/augustinefou
What are Good Bots?
Augustine Fou, PhD.
acfou [at] mktsci.com
212. 203 . 7239

2. January 2017 / Page 1marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
linkedin.com/in/augustinefou
Good bots say their name honestly
HTTP_USER_AGENT Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X
10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/40.0.2214.111 Safari/537.36 moatbot
HTTP_USER_AGENT Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1;
+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
HTTP_USER_AGENT Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0
like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 (compatible;
bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
HTTP_USER_AGENT Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_1
like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Version/8.0 Mobile/12B411 Safari/600.1.4 (compatible;
YandexMobileBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)

3. January 2017 / Page 2marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
linkedin.com/in/augustinefou
… and they don’t come in large quantities
100% declared bot
(orange)
Time series
(<0.1% of visits)

4. January 2017 / Page 3marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
linkedin.com/in/augustinefou
Googlebot honestly declares itself; small quantities
100% search bot
(yellow)
Time series
(<0.1% of visits)

5. January 2017 / Page 4marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
linkedin.com/in/augustinefou
About the Author
January 2017
Augustine Fou, PhD.
acfou@mktsci.com
212. 203 .7239

6. January 2017 / Page 5marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
linkedin.com/in/augustinefou
Dr. Augustine Fou – Independent Ad Fraud Researcher
2013
2014
Follow me on
LinkedIn (click) and on Twitter @acfou (click)
Further reading:
http://www.slideshare.net/augustinefou/presentations
https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/augustinefou
2016
2015

7. January 2017 / Page 6marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
linkedin.com/in/augustinefou
Harvard Business Review – October 2015
Excerpt:
Hunting the Bots
Fou, a prodigy who earned a Ph.D. from MIT at
23, belongs to the generation that witnessed
the rise of digital marketers, having crafted his
trade at American Express, one of the most
successful American consumer brands, and at
Omnicom, one of the largest global advertising
agencies. Eventually stepping away from
corporate life, Fou started his own practice,
focusing on digital marketing fraud
investigation.
Fou’s experiment proved that fake traffic is
unproductive traffic. The fake visitors inflated
the traffic statistics but contributed nothing to
conversions, which stayed steady even after the
traffic plummeted (bottom chart). Fake traffic is
generated by “bad-guy bots.” A bot is computer
code that runs automated tasks.