Metrics to tell us whether what we’re doing is making an impact or if it’s waste of time. In fact, if we can’t measure what we’re doing, then we are wasting our time.

On SpecifiedBy, our aim is to give you an accurate view of how your products are performing and to help you improve the quality of your product listings in order to make them perform better and generate more leads.

But showing you how your products are performing is more complex than it might sound.

Your building products are accessible by anybody on the Internet and this is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good because anybody who is connected to the Internet has access to your product information.

However, the Internet is not only used by humans. Machines, or so called bots, go from website to website extracting information. Search engines such as Google have a swarm of bots indexing the Internet all day every day.

In fact, 48.5% of the Internet’s traffic comes from bots.

Consequently, bots generate fake traffic and fake stats into most analytics accounts.

It's fair to say that almost every website that offers analytics based on web traffic data, and doesn’t have measures to filter out bot traffic, has a high percentage of 'fake' statistics.

This presents a problem as it pushes you away from the 'truth' and what you want to achieve.

The good news is that over the last couple of years, we have invested heavily in technologies to provide you with the most genuine statistics and leads possible.

Here are some of the measures we have taken to achieve that:

  • Developed a custom technology to identify and filter out non-human traffic.
  • Filter out student traffic
  • Filter out manufacturer traffic
  • Filter out logged in and non-logged traffic from SpecifiedBy’s employees.

This effort has helped us to collect accurate, reliable data on specifier behavior and do some interesting data analysis to improve the features specifiers and building product companies love the most.

Our research has found out that none of our competitors are doing anything to filter out bot traffic.

In fact, from what we've seen, we would guess that most of them, knowingly or otherwise, depend on this 'bot' traffic to make their offering more appealing.

Finally, we not only want to give you genuine stats about how your products are performing but we also want to help you do better.

We recently found out that there is a clear correlation between the popularity of a product and the quality of the information.

Read our guide on how to improve the quality of the information you provide about your products.