Matt,
You could try looking at the referrer info -- are the "shoppers" connecting
from some site that is sending you traffic or is it just that they are "typing
in" your URL. Robots are not likely to carry referrer data.
Second, you could do some IP/DNS reasearch. Where are the "shoppers" coming
from? Are they aol.com or dsl lines? Do they look like residential or business
accounts? Of course this depends on the type of shoppers you expect to get.
HTH,
--
Jeremy Wadsack
Digital Media Consultant
___________________________
Wadsack-Allen Digital Group
http://www.wadsack-allen.com/digitalgroup/
Matt Morgan wrote:
> We use anonymous cookies to identify unique visitors to our sites and
> determine things like requests/visitor, etc. It's not perfect but it works
> pretty well, as long as your time-scale is short enough that you can make
> insignificant the probability that many users have lost/deleted their
> cookies. It's lots better than any other way to count visits/visitors.
>
> I'm increasingly worried about how robots/crawlers handle cookies. I
> imagine most of them reject cookies, which is fine. Lots of them probably
> accept cookies in order to index registration-required sites. Those are
> fine, too (since they make so many requests they're easy to exclude). What
> we're worried about is whether maybe some of them first accept and then
> delete their cookies, so they appear to be different users each time they
> make a request or with each visit.
>
> That sounds dumb, and I can't think of any reason they would do that, but I
> also can't find anything that says they don't. The thing is, our traffic
> has increased a lot lately, and we can't attribute it to advertising or
> anything sensible. With all the new shopping-bots out there, and probably
> hundreds or of data-mining companies with their own secretive web-bots, I
> wonder if we're just getting lots of them pretending to be humans using
> navigator or IE.
>
> Anybody have any suggestions for an easy way to sort this out? Or pointers
> to any info to check out?
>
> Thanks,
> Matt Morgan
>
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