Like any digital transformation, data-driven transformation encounters the same roadblocks, with some added complexity. As data service providers, we see a primary challenge for brands: they collect data from every possible avenue but struggle to configure it to drive value. The complexity deepens when considering how that data moves, what the right insights are, and how it all affects their marketing workflows. 

Brands often recognize an opportunity for transformation, whether from regulatory changes, organizational shifts or the simple desire to better understand their users. But actually getting there—determining the right workstreams and creating lasting impact—is a challenge that requires a clear goal and a plan. When it comes to data transformations, this challenge often leads to hesitancy, which is expected. After all, data is powerful: it determines where media is served, which products are prioritized and how the foundational AI models are built.

A successful data transformation requires understanding where a brand is now, where it needs to go and the steps to get there. This journey depends on having the right partners, platforms and internal support. Our partnership with Amplitude embodies this idea by providing brands with an optimal foundation and a clear pathway to make data-driven changes that drive the greatest impact.

We’re proud partner with Amplitude and to be recognized as Amplitude’s first Global Solutions Partner as we continue to help Brands drive digital transformation, data-driven transformation and fundamental AI integrations. As the first Global Solutions Partner, we’re bringing together our expertise in analytics, experimentation, personalization and AI to Amplitude’s digital experience platform to help brands unlock their data’s full potential, with the ideal set-up for owned experience optimizations.

A combined force for owned experience optimization.

In today’s digital landscape, the amount of data any brand captures is likely to be unfathomably large: petabytes of unique, and interwoven touchpoints, events and clicks that show exactly how users are interacting with a brand. Making meaningful change from the right combination of omnichannel data drives incredible value and increased effectiveness, but data can reach a threshold beyond what human analysts can analyze. It’s no secret to leading brands, however, that digital innovation, AI and agentic flows have drastically changed that conversation around the feasibility of processing, synthesizing and acting on the infinitely compounding potential combinations of data.

The caveat, though, is that unlocking these benefits requires set-up, direction and scale. Optimizing products, platforms, user journeys or any owned brand experience with AI requires access to the right “flavours” of quantitative and qualitative data that the AI solutions can be built upon.

With Amplitude and Monks, the scale is already factored in. The latest launch of Amplitude’s AI Agents functionality, backed by a comprehensive suite of tools through Amplitude’s robust platform, allows us to provide brands with native data workflows that build out from the existing ability to identify meaningful insights, develop better experiment hypotheses, and engage users on any owned touchpoint.

Being able to reach users more effectively by understanding the metrics behind a “push-notification-to-app-to-check out” pathway is a valuable insight, but optimizing it needs more than a trend analysis. Across Amplitude’s feature set—Guides and Surveys, Heatmapping, Session-Replays and AI Agents—we help brands generate better test ideas, faster. This is done by analyzing complex user data through scalable, proven experimentation workflows.

With data-driven innovation, a brand's output is only as good as their input. The quality and reach of AI solutions need the right data to drive the best outcome. As a service and solutions provider, Amplitude provides an ideal foundation to bring transparency to performance, build out the ideal orchestration and become a Real-Time Brand.

"Partnering with Monks, our first Global Solutions Partner, is a significant step forward in helping brands all over the world use data and AI to build best-in-class digital experiences. Together, we're enabling brands to optimize their websites, apps, and products, and generate greater returns on their investments in data..."

Peter Kuo, VP Partnerships, Amplitude

Bringing Our Real-Time Brand Capabilities to Amplitude’s Toolkit

For brands that are able to understand the direction, goal and steps for their data-driven transformations, the path to exponential value and increased targeting lies in their ability to improve the speed, response and action of their data workflow.

Driving the greatest value for a brand's experimentation culture means establishing a positive feedback loop, where real-time campaign performance informs ongoing experimentation for faster, more targeted testing. With capabilities like real-time A/B testing and pushes that don't require slow release cycles, the barriers to running meaningful tests are significantly lowered. This improves cross-vertical alignment and enables brands to move from real-time insights to active experiments that constantly improve.

While improved media targeting is a well-known benefit of data analytics, a truly data-driven brand uses the right tools to optimize its entire marketing ecosystem. This means extending optimizations across the full user journey, from the ad creative that brings a user to the site all the way to the ideal on-page experience. Our partnership with Amplitude provides the gateway for brands to achieve this by connecting with users on their own terms, creating an experience that cuts through the noise.

Democratizing data for brands, globally.

Data isn’t just about collection. A pile of collected data does not inherently drive value for brands; in fact, it can exponentially inflate the cost for storage, querying and meaningful analysis. 

Rather, it’s about how you can transform, interpret and, most importantly, act on the insights within your data that truly matter. The combinations, insights and metrics tracked through any variety of data analytics platforms have different purposes dependent on the end goal they are meant to augment and supplement. 

The data workflows used for ingesting, understanding and optimizing the journey and touchpoints that users interact with requires a data solution and platform that are built with that in mind from the ground up.

For brands eager to drive value from meaningful AI transformations, the formula is simple: they need a solid data and AI platform, an expert service partner who knows how to use it, and the combined power that comes from a seamless integration of both.  When working alongside a combined service and platform partner with shared expertise in optimizing user experiences, the path to digital transformation is simple. 

We’re eager to continue empowering brands with cutting-edge, data-driven solutions and innovations alongside Amplitude as their first Global Solutions Partner.

Ready to explore the full potential of your data through strategic experimentation and AI? Let’s talk!

A Legacy of Strategic Partnership

For years, Monks has partnered with Google to elevate our clients' marketing strategies to unprecedented heights.  

Driving Innovation Through Commitment

These certifications underscore our pursuit of excellence in expanding our Google Cloud knowledge base and adopting innovative solutions. Achieving the Data Analytics specialization demonstrates our ability to excel in data ingestion, preparation, storage and analysis using Google Cloud technology. Meanwhile, the Marketing Analytics specialization highlights our capability to transition clients from fragmented datasets to data-driven marketing strategies that yield measurable results.

"This enables Monks to support partners in developing both technical solutions and data strategies that drive their success" my colleague Mikey adds.

Setting the Stage for AI and Machine Learning

These specializations not only validate our expertise but also prepare us to leverage the latest advancements in AI and machine learning. By combining cutting-edge technologies with our deep understanding of data analytics and marketing analytics, we’re poised to unlock even greater value for our clients.

Expanding Capabilities & Innovating with Looker

As we celebrate these achievements, Monks is already looking ahead, leveraging tools like Looker to empower our clients with actionable insights and seamless data visualization. Mikey says, “Looker's semantic layer translates raw data into a language that both downstream users and LLMs can understand. By utilizing LookML to provide trusted business metrics, we create a central hub for data context, definitions and relationships, powering both BI and AI workflows to drive our clients’ businesses forward.”

A Commitment to Client Success

At Monks, our mission is simple yet profound: to empower clients with innovative, data-driven solutions that deliver tangible impact. For years, we’ve championed the importance of breaking down silos, enabling seamless data accessibility across organizations, and building pathways for activation (Optimizing Workflows with First-Party Data). 
These specializations are more than milestones—they embody our dedication to excellence and our pursuit of success for our clients.

“To put it bluntly, we focus on delivering tangible business value to our clients by applying both our technical and marketing expertise,” says Hayden Klei, VP Data Consulting. “We don’t focus on shiny vanity projects for the sake of industry accolades, rather, we define success by the impact we deliver to our clients’ top and bottom lines.”

As we continue to invest in Google Cloud and our talented teams, we are setting ourselves up for even greater achievements, driving value through expertise, innovation and a shared vision of success. Together with Google, Monks is ready to lead the charge into the future of marketing analytics and data-driven solutions.

For organizations seeking a trusted partner to navigate the complexities of data and marketing, Monks stands ready to deliver unparalleled expertise and transformative results. 

As a response to this issue, the most popular digital analytics tools have started to offer bot filtering features. While it is advisable to activate them, they have shown very low effectiveness against the different types of bots that abound on the web; or worse, it could filter out real, and beneficial bot traffic, skewing data in favor of inaccurate traffic. 

Bottom line, our data is at risk.

How does bot traffic impact your business?

For companies making business decisions based on data, bot traffic can have detrimental consequences on their digital strategies. It skews various metrics like conversion rates, bounce rates, total users, and sessions, leading to unexplained fluctuations. Additionally, increased traffic can raise costs for digital analysis tools, as many pricing models are based on the number of visits. AI tools and implementations that train on data impacted by traffic bots can produce inaccurate insights. Bot traffic can also bog down websites by overloading servers, resulting in slow page load times or, in severe cases, making the site inaccessible to users. In extreme situations, allowing unwanted traffic can create security vulnerabilities and lead to leaks of sensitive information.

Recently, one of our clients asked us for assistance in reviewing certain sudden increases in traffic originating from Frankfurt during the early hours of the morning, which did not align with their historical data. After analyzing the reports and cross-referencing the different available dimensions, we discovered that, during certain periods, 90% of the total users recorded in the reports exhibited behavior that was difficult to attribute to humans. This not only seriously affected the data quality but also incurred significant expenses due to the volume of visits the website was receiving.

However, it’s not just extreme situations that can affect our data quality. Even a small percentage of anomalies can lead to unreliable reports. So, how can we stop this and keep our data reliable?

Know the enemy

The first step to effectively counteract bots is to understand them. Not all bots are alike; each type demands a unique strategy. A common classification distinguishes between malicious and non-malicious bots. Let’s examine some typical examples of malicious ones.

Types of malicious traffic bots

1. Scalper bots:

These programs snap up tickets and other limited-availability goods at lightning speed, only to resell them later at higher prices.

2. Spam bots:

Designed to flood your inbox or messages with junk, often laden with malicious links. Who hasn't been on the receiving end of annoying spam?

3. Scraper bots: 

These bots automatically extract data from websites, often copying content from competitors to gain an edge.

On the other hand, non-malicious bots are the ones that can quickly handle tedious tasks. They gather large amounts of data that would otherwise take days or even months to retrieve, easing the burden on humans for repetitive tasks.

Types of beneficial traffic bots

1. Spider (web crawler): 

Google's bots are some of the most advanced. They relentlessly search the web for videos, images, text, links, and more. Without these crawlers, websites wouldn't get any organic search traffic.

2. Backlink checkers: 

These tools help you find all the links a website or page receives from other sites. They’re crucial for SEO.

3. Website monitoring bots: 

These bots watch over websites and can alert the owner if, for instance, the site is under attack by hackers or goes offline.

My goal isn’t to exhaustively detail every type of bot out there, as they are constantly evolving. Instead, I want to highlight the various behaviors that influence our filtering and removal strategies, as well as the complexity involved. In the end, whether they are good or bad, all bots are unwanted in our reports, and we need to minimize their impact on our data.

Countering bot attacks with the right tools

Nowadays, you can find both automated and manual strategies to tackle this challenge. In the case of automated solutions, bot filtering programs stand out, either integrated into analytical tools or specialized software for AI-driven bot detection. However, as mentioned earlier, their effectiveness tends to be low, and in many cases, they come with associated costs.

On the other hand, we have non-automated solutions that provide better results, and we can categorize them based on the filtering approach they adopt:

Reactive Approach: Apply custom filters at the report level. This method is simple and flexible, requiring no development-level changes. It's an effective first step for early detection. Utilizing tools available in analytics platforms—like GA4 segments, Looker Studio filters and data warehouse queries—makes it easy to implement, though it’s less robust.

Preventive Approach: Implement filters before collecting data. Although this can be challenging and resource-intensive, it effectively prevents the impact on reporting and restricts bots from accessing the website and its servers.

Establishing a data quality review cycle

To keep our data free from bot traffic and ensure optimal results, it’s best to use a comprehensive strategy combining both preventive and reactive measures. This is known as the data quality review cycle, a model of continuous monitoring designed to constantly detect anomalies. It involves collaborative efforts from analysts, developers, and product owners to find efficient solutions that safeguard the integrity and reliability of the data.

Although we can’t entirely eliminate bot traffic from our reports, proactively implementing data quality review strategies offers us practical and effective ways to address this issue.

In summary

• Bots can serve both harmful and benign purposes; in both cases, it's crucial to keep them out of reports.
• Bot traffic has negative consequences for both digital and commercial strategies.
• While analytics platforms have features that automatically block some bot traffic, their effectiveness is limited.
• Constantly monitoring anomalies in the reports is essential for identifying bot traffic.
• To avoid unwanted traffic influence and ensure that the data is not biased or contaminated, it’s necessary to implement both preventive and reactive measures.
• Including a data quality review cycle in the workflow is crucial for keeping the reports free from bot traffic.

For those who already migrated to GA4, the retrieval of historical UA data might still be a challenge, but one that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. The end of UA brings the irrevocable loss of priceless historical data, which is key to understanding performance over time. This loss prevents you from identifying trends or addressing questions about past purchases or campaigns, creating gaps that can impact your bottom line. 

That said, If exporting historical data from UA properties was easy, I wouldn’t be writing about it. To tackle these challenges, Media.Monks has developed our own Universal Analytics Data Export & Archive Tool, a custom tool that helps clients efficiently extract and store their historical data.

A tailored solution designed to solve common challenges.

Unlike off-the-shelf tools, the UA Data Export & Archive Tool offers tailored data extraction, ensuring data is accurately captured and organized according to your specific business needs. On top of that, standard UA users had very limited data export capabilities. But even with an upgraded 360 version, achieving a seamless and comprehensive export is difficult due to backfill limitations.

With a focus on frictionless delivery, the UA Data Export & Archive Tool addresses these limitations to guarantee a smooth transition. “Our data scientists have created a custom script to solve our clients UA export issues, whether your property was upgraded to 360 and linked to BigQuery or not.” says Brianna Mersey, Senior Director, Data. “The tool uses the Google Analytics Reporting API (v4) to export data into BigQuery or any designated data warehouse.”

In other words, UA Data Export & Archive Tool lets you export and own your UA historical data in a first-party environment—even if you don’t have the 360 version. 

Seven steps for a straightforward process.

The UA Data Export & Archive Tool is designed to make the data extraction and archiving process seamless and efficient. Here’s a breakdown of how it works:

• Initial Assessment: We begin with a thorough assessment of your current UA setup and data needs. This helps us understand the scope of data to be exported and any specific requirements you may have.
• Custom Python Scripts: Using Python code in Google Colab, our data scientists have developed scripts that automate the data export process. These scripts are customized to create aggregated reporting tables aligned with your desired dimensions and metrics.
• Data Aggregation and Structuring: The exported data is aggregated and organized into structured tables. 
• Data Storage: Once the data is exported and structured, it is securely stored in the data warehouse of your choice, such as BigQuery or any other designated storage solution. This ensures you maintain control over your historical data.
• Custom Reporting: Our solution offers the ability to build up to five custom tables or reports based on your specific requirements, enabling you to access the most relevant insights for your business.
• Expert Support: Throughout the process, our team provides expert support to ensure your data is accurately captured and properly aligned with your new analytics system. This includes assistance in setting up a secure data warehousing solution if desired.
• Privacy and Compliance: The tool adheres to industry best practices for privacy and data security, ensuring that your data remains confidential and compliant with all relevant regulations.

Efficiently organized data turns into capitalized opportunities.

In times of economic uncertainty and in a data era where everything is moving faster, having historical data is essential for adjusting marketing strategies and making predictive and informed business decisions. That’s why the urgency to properly export your UA data cannot be overstated. “If you have even the slightest concern about losing your data, for benchmarking and year on year comparisons, now is the time to act,” says Mersey.

With only weeks left before UA shuts down, every day counts. Don’t risk losing valuable historical data and keep the insights crucial for your business’s success.

If you need to retrieve and store your historical UA data, we're here to help. Fill out the form below to get in touch with one of our data experts.