How Referrer Spam Is Ruining Your Google Analytics Reporting

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

Hi. Today I wanted to go over referrer spam. It seems to be a pretty big problem these days. You’ve probably seen it in your Analytics accounts.

If you check referral data, you’ll see things like ‘floating-share-buttons’ and ‘seo-success.com’. Things like these, basically, that is not real traffic, and it’s fake data being injected into your Analytics account via the Google Analytics server. So it’s not a real visit. This is done by the spammers randomly generate UA codes. So they don’t actually visit your site or know the hostname of your site, which is an important thing to remember when using the filter, but we’ll come to that later.

Why do they do this? Basically, it’s an easy way to get traffic. It’s pretty clever because people are curious. They’re going to click on the referrals, see what they are, and then, obviously, that logs as a visit for them. They may also get money through affiliate marketing. I’ve seen some of these sites go to ecommerce sites and some dodgy stuff. So they may get a kick-back from sending traffic their way.

Why is this a problem? Basically, it’s going to artificially inflate your traffic. So if you’re going to send reports to your boss or review it yourself, it’s going to be inaccurate, and it can affect other metrics like your conversion rate or even revenue.

So how to stop this? Basically, the best way I found to combat this is something called a valid hostname filter, which will be implemented in your Analytics account. Basically, the way this works, because the UA codes are randomly generated, the referrals, the spammers do not know the hostname of your site, so it works by only including valid ones. So it will be, for example, Koozai.com, or there’s a few other things which you want to include, like Google Translate, or maybe your dev site will be in there. But basically, the process is a bit complicated, and we’ll be covering it further on our blog. So if you need more information on that, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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