Is it possible to Spoof Analytics to give false Unique Visitor Data for Site A to Site B
-
Hi,
We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc.
The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them.
As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent.
The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is
1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it).
2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors).
Many thanks in advance
-
You might be better with a server side tracker like http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
The answer from Mat probably has the best logic, but the only problem is are you legally responsible for mitigating the possibility of fraud?
I would make sure you add this to the contract, as I am not sure you are going to be able to defeat a proxy or spoofer, just in case the referrer gets smart and decides to work the system.
An anti fraud system can be put into place, but LOL I am not sure you will have the access to the multi million dollar fraud monitoring tools that Google does, that are contstantly updated and algorithmically and systematically monitor as well as have auditors who manually do random checks...
-
Hi - Well we are really just acting on behalf of the client - that's what they want.
Also its only visitors from that specific website (very close niche) - not just any site
-
Google Analytics doesn't report IP Address though - which is another reason to take a different root. Not knocking GA, I love it. However it isn't the right tools for this.
I suspect that the fiverr gigs use ping or something the create the mass of "unique visits". Very easy to spot. Unless you have some fairly sophisticated tools to hand i'd imagine that any method that can deliver 5000 for $5 is going to be pretty easy to spot.
Might try it now though. I love fiverr for testing stuff
-
If you must use Analytics, I would drill down to the source of referral within analytics. This will give you the URL, page, or whatever. I think you can also drill down to the referring IP etc...
You need to log were they come from through them. Export your results every month and see a pattern.
If you get 500 referrals from website B's IP or URL, then its a sure way of knowing they are throwing people at you.
But Mats answer is best, will give you times, not just dates and will also give you more detailed info.
-
My question is: is unique visitors the right metric that you should be measuring? On Fiverr.com I can get 2000 to 10,000 unique visitors for $5. http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?query=unique+visitors&x=0&y=0
Can you tie your metrics to something else that might have more value for you, such as purchases, newsletter signups (still easy to fake, but at least takes a little more time), etc?
-
Google Analytics isn't designed to pull the data in the way you really want to for something like this. It can be done I suppose, but it'd be hard work.
There are only so many metrics you can measure, and all are pretty easy to fake. However having the data is an easy to access form means that you can spot patterns and behaviour, which are much harder to fake.
Probably a starting point would be to measure distribution of the various metrics on the referred traffic v the general trend. If one particular C class block (or user agent, or resolution, or operating system, or whatever) appeared at a different frequency in the paid traffic that would be a good place to look deeper.
Thinking less technically for a moment though, I bet you could just implement one of the many anti click fraud systems to do most of this for you. same idea, but someone else has already done the coding. Googling for click fraud brings up a stack of ads (tempting to click them loads and set off their alarms!!).
-
Hi Mat,
A very informative answer.
If someone is going to try and spoof analytics, then would they not also be able to equally try and fool the script?
If someone was to try this do you know how they would likely try and do it - essentially if I know what is likely to be tried, then I can work out something that could counteract it. Are there certain things that can't be fooled, or are very difficult to fool ? - EG things like browser resolution, location etc - or are this just as easy to spoof as anything else?
many thanks
-
It isn't hard to fake this at all I am afraid. Spotting it will depend on how sophisticated the person doing it is.
My personal preference would be not to use analytics as the means of counting it. Doing that you are going to be slightly limited in the metrics you have available and will always be "correcting" data and looking for problems rather than measuring more correctly and having problems spotted.
I'd have a script on page that logs that checks for a referrer and it if matches the pattern for website B creates a log record instead.
You then have the ability to set your rules. For instance if you get 2 referrals from the same IP a second apart would you count them? What about 10 per hour 24 hours a day? You can also log the exact timestamp with whatever variables you want to collect, so each click from the referring site might be recorded as:
- Time stamp
- Exact referring URL
- User agent
- IP
- Last visit (based on cookie)
- Total visits (based on cookie)
- #pages viewed (updating cookie on subsequent page views )
- and so on
Analytics doesn't give you access to the data in quite the same way. I'd definitely want to be logging it myself if the money involved is reasonable.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site Migration Question
Hi Guys, I am preparing for a pretty standard site migration. Small business website moving to a new domain, new branding and new cms. Pretty much a perfect storm. Right now the new website is being designed and will need another month, however the client is pretty antsy to get her new brand out over the web. We cannot change the current site, which has the old branding. She wants to start passing out business cards and hang banners with the new domain and brand. However, I don't want to be messing with any redirects and potentially screw up a clean migration from the old site to the new. To be specific, she wants to redirect the new domain to the current domain and then when the new site, flip the redirect. However, I'm a little apprehensive with that because a site migration from the current to the new is already so intricate, I don't want to leave any possibility of error. I'm trying to figure out the best solution, these are 2 options I am thinking of: DO NOT market new domain. Reprint all Marketing material and wait until new domain is up and then start marketing it. (At cost to client) Create a one pager on new domain saying the site is being built & have a No Follow link to the current site. No redirects added. Just the no follow link. I'd like option 2 so that the client could start passing out material, but my number one concern is messing with any part of the migration. We are about to submit a sitemap index to Google Search Console for the current site, so we are just starting the site migration. What do you guys think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Khoo0 -
Is there an issue with my site?
Been mostly hanging around top of page two for the last couple of years for “Liverpool Wedding photographer” although got myself on page 1 for “Liverpool photographer” I have split the title of the page to target these two keywords. I took the Liverpool photographer off the title to see if it was being detrimental to the “Liverpool wedding photographer” I didn’t see no increase in ranking so put it back as I get a bit of commercial work from it. Since last year I have got onto page 1 at least three times around position 5-6. Within a week or two I start sliding down again and end up back at top of page two. I could understand this slow push out if my competitors were busy SEO wise but from what I have seen they are not. There is a guy using the keywords in URL and calls himself “Liverpool wedding photographer” last time I checked he literally had no links but is in the first 5 positions. I have I think a better link profile than every one else. Although I am on and off with Facebook and Instagram, (more off) so that probably isn’t helping. Although I have a colleague in the video side of things and he doesn’t use social media at all and it hasn’t harmed him. A few years ago I was burned quite badly by a total charlatan. He sunk my home page to page 4. He talked the talk about creating landing pages but his methods were shoddy to say the least. I can’t believe I was taken in by him, although I was only with him for 2 months. He was still using spammy link techniques to generate lots of toxic links for me! I disavowed all of his links and put the keywords back on the home page and was back to my usual top of page 2 position within a week. Since then I have disavowed all directory links and anything not wedding related. I have an article which ranks 1st or second for “Nikon CLS”. I have also another article of 2000 words or so on another reasonable placed photography website. A few links from other vendors or people I have taken photographs for. I have about 10 featured weddings with a link on 4 good weddings blogs. I don’t think a massive amount of blog comments although I have stopped doing this. If I look at most of the competitors these are their main links, with directories as well! Last winter I put a quite substantial article about documentary wedding photography on my home page. I flew to number 2, although I photographed The World Transformed (the alternative labour conference in Liverpool). I got a lot of clicks to a gallery page (few thousand off social media} so I don’t know if that coincided with it. Same thing – watching the website go down a few positions every day until within just over a week or two I was about 4<sup>th</sup> on page 2! Its like my website is on a spring which can push into page 1 but rebounds back to top of page 2. I am staring to worry that my site has been marked as a bad character in some way because I get what seems to be rough treatment from google compared to my peers. I have written I think 4 or 5 (1500 word) articles the last couple of months talking about lenses and wedding photography related topics and Google pushed me back to page 1, peaking At position 5. I was there for a few weeks and then the slide happened again. Bit demoralised at the moment, what to do? Any help or pointers would be most appreciated. Best wishes. David.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WallerD0 -
Data Vocab or Schema?
Hi I've always used schema mark up in previous companies, however product pages on the site I'm currently working on are in data vocab. I cant find much about data vocab, so is it best to move away from this? I need to update the mark up on our product pages - so want the best mark up for this Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Site redesign..have I done everything?
Hello, We have a site that was recently put through the redesign process-a couple of weeks ago. It was a tired site that was optimized well, but still struggled because it was so outdated. I went ahead and re-optimized, submitted a new sitemap, and did the fetch. Have I missed a step? Could someone offer insight into what they do when a site is redesigned and the steps taken to make sure that Google crawls and "appreciates" 🙂 the new site as soon as possible? Thanks in advance for any and all help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lfrazer0 -
SEO Site Analysis
I am looking for a company doing a SEO analysis on our website www.interelectronix.com and write a optimization proposal incl. a budgetary quote for performing those optimizations.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | interelectronix0 -
Sitemap for SmartPhone site
Hello I have a smartphone site (e.g.m.abc.com). To my understanding we do not need a mobile sitemap as its not a traditional mobile site. Shall I add those mobile site links in my regular www XML sitemap or not bother to add the links as we already have rel = canonical (on m.abc.com ) and rel= alternate in place (on www site) to respective pages. Please suggests a solution. I really look forward to an answer as I haven't found the "official" answer to this question anywhere.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdobeVAS0 -
How to get site into Yahoo News?
Can anyone provide some guidance on both how to submit your site to Yahoo News as well as some tips for how to get accepted into Yahoo News?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
Ranking a site in the USA
I'm UK based and looking at setting up a site to rank in the USA. As I understand it a .com TLD is best but these are used worldwide so do I simply need to set the geotargeting to USA in webmaster tools? Or is there a better domain to use? With hosting the site in US and on page content related to US cities (I plan to create a page for each US city I operate in the the city name in the H1 tag) will that be enough for google to understand that the page should rank in the US version of google. Also how can I view Google USA search results - when I go to google.com it automatically redirects to google.co.uk and I can only change the location on the left hand side to UK cities. Any help much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0