Analysis of aggregated bot and human traffic on e-commerce site

A significant volume of Web traffic nowadays can be attributed to robots. Although some of them, e.g., search-engine crawlers, perform useful tasks on a website, others may be malicious and should be banned. Consequently, there is a growing need to identify bots and to characterize their behavior. This paper investigates the share of bot-generated traffic on an e-commerce site and studies differences in bots´ and humans´ session-based traffic by analyzing data recorded in Web server log files. Results show that both kinds of sessions reveal different characteristics, including the session duration, the number of pages visited in session, the number of requests, the volume of data transferred, the mean time per page, the number of images per page, and the percentage of pages with unassigned referrers.