Google analytics “referral” spam is a common problem with webmasters – often seeing 100’s of visitors from various sources, only to realize the majority of them are either fake or illegal.

Whilst it’s difficult to “block” this traffic through your website (and you’d need to do this through your web hosting software), whybitcoinprice it’s relatively simple to get rid of it from your Google Analytics reports.

To do this, there are two features you need to use. The first is the “Filters” feature of GA. This allows you to remove any future fake referral traffic from your reports. The second is the “Segments” feature – which basically allows you to remove the various “fake” spam visitors from your current reports.

The following will explain how to do this properly…

Cause

The majority of “SPAM” traffic comes from bots. These are well-documented (they’re known as referral spam, bombreport log spam or referrer bombing) – and basically work by the spammer sending fake requests to a website in the hope that their referral information (typically including some sort of advertising message) will be republished by the target website. The practice is commonly associated with spam farms and fake virus creators. Unfortunately, it’s particularly prevalent with Google Analytics users (where the spammer may not even access the target site).

Solution

1. Filters

The first step is to use the “Filters” feature to remove future referral spam from your analytics profile. This is only available if you’re using the new “gtag.js” Javascript widget (as opposed to the older “analytics.js” widget).

The setup of “filters” is simple:

• Click onto “Admin” (left) icon (it’s a small “cog” icon at the bottom left of the screen)
• On the screen which shows, click “All Filters” from the left-most column
• When the filters show, vybecandy you’ll be able to add the ones you need

You need to add several filters – firstly to ensure that any extra “spam” sites are not sending random referral traffic to your sites; secondly, to target specific sites which may be sending referral spam…

1. Click “+ Add Filter”
2. Add the domain name that’s sending the fake traffic to the “name” box
3. For “Filter Type”, select “Custom”
4. From the bullet-points, select “Exclude”
5. Select “Campaign Source” and then type the domain that’s sending fake traffic into the box provided
6. Apply it to as many views as you need (we just add it to all views) ufa168live
7. Click “Save”

This will remove the fake traffic from the specific domains listed in your filter.

However, you also need to add a number of other filters to get rid of the swathes of fake traffic permeating the net.

These are from “standardized” fake websites, chronicleshub which means you’ll need to add several of them in order to get rid of the majority of fake traffic from your future reports:

• Click “+ Add Filter”
• Add the name “Spam1” to the “name” box
• Select “Custom” from the options box and from the “Filter Field”, select “Campaign Source”
• Into the input box, type the following:
• dailyrank|100dollars-SEO|semalt|anticrawler|sitevaluation|buttons-for-website|buttons-for-your-website|-musicas*-gratis|best-SEO-offer|best-SEO-solution|savetubevideo|ranksonic|offers.bycontext|7makemoneyonline|kambasoft|medispainstitute

This removes the largest number of “fake” websites that typically flood the “referrals” reports on Analytics. Whilst not essential, it will ensure that your reports remain as honest as possible.

2. Segments

The second step is to add a “No Spam” segment to your views.

Whilst this doesn’t remove the various reports from your system, it does ensure that you’re not seeing the various spam websites in your traffic reports.