I come across a lot of people enquiring about website traffic generator software online. They are desperate to get a utility that will increase traffic to their websites instantly without working on the website’s SEO, SMM, SEM or other forms of digital marketing. But the question is whether a software can give you real traffic and whether such a software really exists or not. I answer these questions below. Please read on.

Can a Software Send Real Traffic to a Website?

The answer to the question whether a software can send real traffic to a website is “No”. Think about it logically. A computer software is a piece of code that runs on a machine and performs whatever operations the developer of that software has coded into it. It is not possible for any software to ask real human beings to visit a website and perform actions like subscribing to an email list, filling up a contact form, downloading a software or buying a product, etc. It is really frustrating to see people trying to find such a website traffic generator software.

Availability of Website Traffic Generator Software

One may argue that there are several website traffic generator software available online. Now, the reality is that such software don’t do what their users expect them to do. The maximum a software can do is issue web requests to a website programmatically. This is similar to an actual human being visiting a website. A request gets issued and the HTML response from the web server is used in a manner that gives the impression that a human being has visited the website. Thus, all a website traffic generator software can do is produce what are commonly known as “bots” that simulate human behaviour while visiting a website. These bots can be programmed to do whatever the developer wants. For instance, Google’s web crawlers are also bots that crawl websites and take the information back to Google’s servers.

Types of Bots – The Good and The Bad

Since bots are programmed web requests, their developers can make them do virtually anything they want. Some great companies and developers rely on such bots for the accumulation of information on the internet. They use this information to develop software that are really revolutionizing the way we work. Technically, web requests using such bots constitute traffic to a website. But, such traffic would not ever convert simply because it is not a human being visiting a website – it is a bot. This is the reason that you, as a webmaster, may not want to see such traffic statistics inside various analytics tools like Google Analytics. There is an option in Google Analytics which you can turn on/off to enable/disable bot filtering. Look at the following snapshot:

People use bots for different purposes. Some of them use bots ethically while an increasing number of people are using bots for unethical practices these days. A bot must let the website know through HTTP headers that it is a bot. This enables the webmaster to handle those requests appropriately which might be different from the way real traffic is handled. For example, a webmaster can prevent bots from accessing a specific web page or a group of web pages using “robots.txt”. However, bots can be programmed so as to conceal their identity and pretend to be an actual human being. If that is done, there is no way for a website or tools like Google Analytics to know that a request is coming from a bot. Turning bot filtering on/off inside Google Analytics also has no effect in such a case. To justify this, I have made a small software for testing purposes. The bots generated through this software were not detected by Google Analytics.

I request the readers of this post to not use this website traffic generator software for unethical practices. I have developed this software only for testing purposes. You can definitely use it for load testing and other ethical purposes. To prevent its misuse, I have implemented a licensing mechanism and you would need a license key from me to be able to use this software.

Conclusion

I urge people not to waste their money on software that claim to drive real traffic to your website. No software in the world can bring real human beings to your website. If you wish to increase your website’s traffic, the only option is to come up with high quality content on your website. If you really satisfy your visitors with what they were looking for, you will eventually end up having great rankings on search engines.

You may like to read this post on implementing structured data which will definitely help your website have good rankings on search engines.