Scaletrix minimizes bot traffic with precise analytics for Paylocity
Paylocity specializes in cutting-edge HR automation solutions for businesses of all sizes. The company’s USP lies in streamlining and enhancing human resource processes through advanced technology designed to help clients manage their workforce effectively and achieve long-term organizational goals.
We recently spoke to the Paylocity Marketing Team lead to understand the problem and how Scaletrix played a pivotal role in solving it.
Here’s how our conversation went.
Can you elaborate on what exactly happened with the bot traffic on your website?
Paylocity engages with clients across the globe in streamlining the HR processes and optimizing the entire workflow toward achieving long-term business goals with our HR solutions. While we have a good influx of organic traffic, we noticed some discrepancies recently when we tried to validate the traffic.
We were getting a lot of bot-generated traffic that was diluting our exact number of genuine visitors, leading us to make wrong assumptions in our analytics. Since a lot of the traffic was bot-generated, our page performance was dipping because the total organic traffic or user behavior was not tallying with the end conversion metrics.
Is this similar to the chatbots we usually see in websites that capture leads?
No. This is very different from that. With chatbots, you capture first-hand lead information and pass it to your CRM, where the next set of actions happens.
We were dealing with automated machines trying to do certain user actions like clicking on a CTA, filling up a form, or probably copying some content from our website or product pages. This automated action was counted as user traffic while an algorithm was at play.
Is this a consequence of implementing some tools, or does this just happen randomly? I'm trying to understand the core problem statement.
It sounds weird, but this is not a consequence of using some tools or doing random programming. This is something that can happen to any website on the internet. You see, multiple data-scrapping tools gather information to display on their platform.
For example, you can take any travel booking website showing different airline pricing in one place. This is what data scraping tools do. They pick information from one website to display on another. As a result, a lot of bot traffic is often redirected to the source websites.
Not someone’s fault, you know. I am just addressing the tip of the iceberg here for you. It’s a lot deeper if you ask!
That sounds complex. So, why did you think of Scaletrix?
We were aware of Scaletrix’s analytical expertise. We needed experts to help us separate all the noise from our organic traffic, and we knew Scaletrix had the capabilities we were looking for.
Tell us more about how Scaletrix helped combat this challenge.
Scaletrix devised a step-by-step solution to help us filter out the noise.
They started by creating a segment that would segregate the bot traffic and exclude it from analysis.
To do this, they looked into the user behavior on our website. This clarified whether the user is a bot or a genuine visitor. For instance, when a user from a particular IP address clicked once on a button but did not do anything else or came to the login page but did not move further, that was marked as a bot-generated user.
The bot traffic was categorized or segmented into bot reps, making additional noise in the analysis.
Isn't it possible that a user comes to your website and does not perform any action? How were you so sure?
Yes. We asked the same question to the Scaletrix team as well. This is how it works –
Let’s say we see a user coming to our product page. If this is a genuine user, it will click a button or scroll through the page. But when a user behavior adds up to a page view with zero actions, it must be a bot. There is no real interaction but automated sessions.
Interesting. How would you say your experience went with Scaletrix?
It went really smoothly. We were skeptical about the data we were acquiring. With Scaletrix’s help, we understood where the discrepancies were, and they were very well-versed in explaining to us the appropriate solution.
We ended up filtering out all the additional noise from our analysis. As a result, our final numbers started to look good, not to mention genuine. The Scaletrix team helped us with intuitive dashboards on Heap Analytics, the tool they used to analyze us.
We created a hypothesis around the analytical data and, in general, addressed all our data-related concerns.
But this wasn’t the only thing the Scaletrix team helped us with.
Really? What else did you work together on?
We were impressed with the in-depth analytical understanding the Scaletrix team brought. So, we pushed our collaboration further in optimizing and revamping our content library.
Do you mean blogs?
No. We are an HR-based analytical solution provider. Our content library has various enablement documents designed to help users navigate our product. You can also call these help guides or knowledge hubs.
Our website has a search option that helps users search using any key term and access the relevant guide for that query.
Before Scaletrix came on board, our content library was not planned out properly. Finding relevant guides or help docs wasn’t as easy as we wanted it to be.
Scaletrix helped us revamp the whole experience with our content library. The team helped us understand the key terms our users are searching for within the platform and whether they are clicking on the results that are showing up.
The detailed search analytics helped us evaluate the terms users are searching for, whether they are engaging with the results shown, and whether they are giving us positive feedback or not.
The behavioral analysis helped us form a hypothesis that users are not interacting with the content they are seeing and that certain parts of the website need revamping to match the search query.
In a nutshell, Scaletrix helped us optimize our product to meet the user demands effectively.
Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time and sharing your experience. Any last words for the Scaletrix team?
Scaletrix resolved issues head-on; that’s exactly what we were looking for. Their analytical understanding goes hand-in-hand with the team’s cumulative experience in this domain. Needless to say, they have their heads in the right place, and it is a treat to collaborate with them.