Everyone across the internet is getting fed up with these pesky spam bots ruining our Google Analytic data for our websites or client sites. If you are not familiar with this problem, basically in “non-geek speak”, certain websites are using faking out Google Anayltics into thinking they are visiting your website hundreds if not thousands times a month. This is causing websites traffic to spike, which is normal conditions, would be great for us, but this is not. These sites are certainly not sending targeted clients or customers and are wrecking out data.
My first attempt to rid GA of this data, was to block these sites from visiting our website through my htaccess file. This works, though in my experience, once they realize you are block one domain, they will just use another. Also, while this will prevent future data from occurring from those sites, it does nothing to remove them from your historical data in GA.
Instead my solution for the sites I own and manage was to setup a custom filter, removing all traffic based off of geographical location. Now, if you are an international company, this will most likely NOT be an ideal solution for you. however, my clients only care about traffic coming from the U.S. and occasionally, Mexico. You can setup custom filters by going to Admin > Custom > Filters in Google Analytic’s.
Basically, I was getting spam traffic from roughly 5-6 main countries, but, any traffic other than US & Mexico is irrelevant so instead of creating a list of the countries I wanted to exclude and then have an issue down the line when they start visiting from other countries as a work around, I elected to instead just include traffic ONLY fro US & Mexico. See my settings above to duplicate.
Please Note: If you do have international traffic, but not in the countries the ghost spam is coming from, you can use this tactic, but instead of including only US traffic, you can create a list of the counties you do get relevant traffic from, or if it’s shorter, you can do the opposite and just exclude traffic from the countries the referral spam is coming from.
Anyways, hope this helps as a temporary fix to this problem. Like others, I am hoping that before too long Google comes up with a fix of their own.
Good luck!
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