About Bot Views and Linkovers at Our Zazzle Stores

[Susang6]

I’ve been seeing a lot of concern about bot activity at our Zazzle stores, both in the community discussions and on other POD websites. It’s clearly something many creators are worried about. I spent some time researching the topic and ended up learning more than I expected. The biggest takeaway was that there’s a lot of mixed information out there, and not all of it lines up with how these systems actually work. I’m not a bot expert, just sharing what I’ve read and my own opinions.

Bots do crawl Zazzle, the same way they crawl every large e‑commerce site. They hit product pages, images, and categories, and sometimes that shows up as views or linkovers that don’t lead to sales. That part is normal and expected. I couldn’t find any article saying bots “change referral IDs,” because that isn’t something bots are capable of doing. Bots crawl pages, but they don’t behave like real shoppers and they don’t interact with referral cookies. Cloudflare explains how bots work, and Google Analytics explains how attribution works, and neither one includes anything about bots overwriting referral codes. I also want to mention that Facebook sends a lot of traffic.

A lot of those FB views come from people scrolling, tapping, and checking things out without commenting or buying right away. So some of the high view counts we see aren’t bots at all  they’re just normal Facebook behavior. We may think a spike in traffic is bots, but it could very well be coming from our Facebook shares. A lot of the “strange” traffic we see is just regular shopper behavior. People browse on their phones, save things for later, click through a link and then wander around the site, or come back without the cookie. Pinterest can send a lot of clicks that don’t convert until much later. All of that shows up as views with no sales, but it’s human behavior, not bots manipulating anything. If anyone wants to read more about how bot traffic works in general, here’s what I read:

Cloudflare’s explanation of normal bot activity and why it shows up in analytics:
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-robots-txt/

And Cloudflare’s overview of bot traffic in general:
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-bot-traffic/

by Susan's Nature & Seasonal Studio   

[Susang6]

Sorry everyone...I have been doing a lot and did not realize that I posted a discussion similar to this one.  Zazzle moderator okay to delete this one as the updated one has the links that explain bot behavior which is probably the better discussion https://community.zazzle.com/t5/general-zazzle-discussion/sharing-my-thoughts-on-linkovers-and-traff...