Filters for referral bots ineffective
-
I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here. I've been trying to block spam from my client's analytics for over a month and I just can't seem to get it right. I am beyond frustrated.
Here is a list of the filters I have:
And here is referral traffic from them regardless:
Specifically this is what the filter looks like. Am I doing something wrong here?
I have also put a filter in place to block traffic from Russia, and it doesn't seem to be working 100% either.
On top of that, it seems anytime I do manage to block something, another site just pops up in its place. Is it endless?
My clients are very small local business and this is absolutely ruining their analytics. I can't even show them their traffic reports since it's absolutely meaningless with all this spam. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
-
Thank you for the quick response. Made the changes you suggested and hopefully over the next few days I'll see the effect.
-
The filter verification takes a small sample of data and sometimes in that sample there won't be any change.
Another reason for what you may get this error is because the filter was saved before the verification, so you will have to delete the filter and create it again for the verification to work. Better yet you can use the filter expression in a segment it will give you a better idea of how the filter will work since the segment is not limited to a few days.
If you try to exclude by the offender don't use referral as a filter field use Campaign Source.
For the filter based on valid hostnames, there is no need to put the domain with and without "www" clientsite.com will match both.
Hope that helps,
-
I've tried the method you suggested for one of my client's sites. I created a new filter, did "Include" -> "Hostname" and added the following:
translate.googleusercontent.com|www.clientsite.com|clientsite.com
It said that it wouldn't change any of the data when I went to verify the filter, which should not be the case. Most of the traffic is from hostnames that are not set. I tried this input as well after reading a different article on the subject:
translate.googleusercontent.com|www.clientsite.com|clientsite.com
Once again to no effect.
So I tried to tackle the referral spam itself (although for this particular site, direct traffic seems to be getting a fair amount of spam as well). I created two filters ( http://imgur.com/ShhAYqv ) that included every spam referral I've ever gotten:
adviceforum.com|social-buttons.com|semalt/.com|free-share-buttons.com|buttons-for-website.com|best-seo.com|darodar.com|semalt.com
dailyrank.net|sitevaluation.org|trafficmonetize.org|4webmasters.org|100dollars-seo.com|webmonetizer.com|event-tracking.com|.*(social-buttons.com)
And, as you can see in the picture, it says there would be no effect.
Aghhhhhh! What am I doing wrong here?
-
I have recently followed Carlos' blog posts and have to say the steps worked a treat. Hopefully the Google Analytics team are working on a way to transfer filters across different analytics accounts to make it easier to keep all sites referral traffic free.
-
Hi Kat,
If you want to exclude the spammer you should use Campaign Source as a field type, instead of predefined filter use:
- Filter type Custom > Exclude
- Filter Field > Campaign Source
- File Pattern Box enter the spammer you want to exclude. You don't need to create a different filter for each one; you can create an expression like this:
4webmasters.com|free-share-buttons.com|trafficmonetize.org|morespammers
The backslashes before the dots "." and the dashes "-" are needed because custom filters use Regular Expressions. You can keep adding up to 255 characters after that you have to create another filter
If you want to try a better solution, I recommend you to try a filter based on your hostnames.
This solution requires a little more time to set up, but it has three huge advantages over the Campaign Source solution- You will stop the spam before it hits you, adding a filter for the referral after you see it will stop it, but by the time you apply it you will have already hits of the spam.
- You will need only ONE filter to stop all ghost spam, instead of creating various sets of filters.
- Lately, some of the spammers(e.g. free-social-buttons) have been hitting GA accounts with fake direct visits along with the referral, the filter for the referral won’t stop the direct visit, on the other hand. The Valid hostname filter will stop ghost spam in any form whether it shows as a referral, keyword or direct visit.
This is what I've been using on my accounts for, the last moths and I haven't received a single hit of ghost spam the vast majority.
Here are a detailed guide and more information about all these solutions and spam in Google Analytics.
http://www.ohow.co/what-is-referrer-spam-how-stop-it-guide/
Hope it helps,
-
I've tried setting up filters in the manner you explain on your site, and yet when I go to verify it, it says that it wouldn't affect my data. I most certainly have spam data from the last seven days so I'm uncertain why it's not working.
I entered in names just as you did in your article, excluding from a campaign source:
dailyrank|sitevaluation|trafficmonetize|4webmasters|100dollars-seo|webmonetizer|event-tracking|free-social-buttons
-
You need to set the exclusion for campaign source, and not the ISP domain.
I highly recommend setting an include only filter for your own hostname.
https://www.marceldigital.com/blog/2015/06/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics
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
-
Referral Data Q's
1. We recently ran a promotion on both FB and Reddit, which is https, linking to our non-https site. We utilized UTM links to our landing page. Our GA campaign data returned extremely low hits in comparison to what we actually received (and recorded via FB/Reddit dashboard). Obviously our Direct traffic spiked during these times, caused by a secure to nonsecure referral, I'm sure. I'm also noticing a spike in referral traffic from lm.facebook.com that correlates to the ad times. Does this mean Facebook's link shim is stripping away my UTM data? My question is why we receive SOME properly UTM-tagged referral traffic in our campaigns? What's allowing some of it to go through? 2. I've tagged our email signature links with UTM as well, hoping to clean up some of our Direct traffic. I understand that external clients like Outlook and Thunderbird likely won't pass referral data, but do hosted clients like Gmail, Yahoo, and such? And if so, would the https to http difference obstruct this again? I'd love some insight onto these questions, especially if I'm off the mark with a few of my assumptions there.
Reporting & Analytics | | kirmeliux0 -
Bot Traffic Higher Than Unfiltered?
We filtered bot traffic from one of our Google Analytics accounts and traffic is higher than with the unfiltered view. Does anyone have an idea what might be causing this?
Reporting & Analytics | | Leithmarketing0 -
How to FILTER in Google Analytics an ad campaign from linkedin?
Hi mozzers We are setting up an a linkedin ad campaign for our agency and want to track its traffic and conversions. The linkedin ad will carry UTMs for each link. For tracking this campaign accurately I thought about creating a new GA View with a specific filter. So my question is about the filtering, should i use the INCLUDE, REFERRAL with pattern LINKEDIN.COM (see image)? if not what would be the best way to track this campaign? My other concern is that we are also running other a job ad on linkedin and I feel these hits will be tracked as well. Is there a way to separate those 2 campaigns? Thanks guys! MzE5hqE.png
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Will 301 redirects (Same Domain) show as referral traffic in Analytics?
For an eCommerce site we have 301'd legacy product pages to new product pages. Is all that traffic going to show up as referral traffic from our own domain in Google Analytics? If so, is there any way to preserve original source/medium info or will all the source/medium info be our own domain since there is a 301 redirect?
Reporting & Analytics | | bozzie3111 -
Using Filters On Google Analytics
Hi Guys, I am In need of some technical help with regards to Google analytics. One of my clients has a site providing HR Software on SaaS basis. The users login via the site for the various HR Tools. Obviously this is skewing the analytics data and showing 10,000+ extra visitors that actually don't exist. Now I understand i can add filters and exclude certain pages for instance the login page, however, some users will visit the home page then click login. How can I exclude them just to show new visitors to the site rather than users that are just trying to login. Hope this makes sense Neil
Reporting & Analytics | | nezona0 -
Google Analytics Custom Filter
Hello, Quick question, when I create a custom filter on a profile that already has data collected will that filter apply to already collected data or will the filter only apply from the day it was created? Am doing a custom exclude IP filter. Much thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | Unity
Davinia0 -
How Do i filter my IP address from the results?
I want to block my IP address so that I get to know the traffic coming to my website
Reporting & Analytics | | pejman500 -
Keyword referrals in GA
Hi chaps, Quick question for you. I'm drilling down in GA to one of our eCommerce pages which has a pretty high bounce rate. I'm looking at referring keywords and they don't seem to make much sense. The page I'm looking at is a pretty deep page but the top referring keywords are all branded terms. The page isn't included in our site links. To explain a little further, this is the scenario I think is happening: User searches using "Brand term". They then click through to our homepage and eventually land on the deep shopping page (on a different subdomain) In GA Content > Site Content > Pages > Primary dimension set to keyword - "Brand term" shows as the referring keyword. Does this sound right? We have a custom GA script set up to track multiple subdomains.
Reporting & Analytics | | Confetti_Wedding0