Spam using Hostname so filter not working

[AL123al]

Hello, on one of our sites, we have filtered via the hostname. We have done this on other sites quite happily but on this particular new website, when we add in the hostname filter, we still get loads of direct and referral traffic which is junk - and the hostname of these junk referrals are the website's domain. So it seems that this filter is not working or the spam are now using the hostname?

Not sure what is going on or how to solve this?

[AL123al]

Thanks Paul, it is a real pain. What do they get out of this? Am I being naive?

[ThompsonPaul]

This is likely to be bot spam - bot crawlers that are actually visiting the site, so their visits record the genuine hostname.

The only way around these clowns is to block the visits in .htaccess and/or use Google Analytics filters to remove the data.

Because they're constantly morphing, it's a bit of an arms race to keep up with them. If your site uses WordPress, there are a number of solid plugins that use crowdsourcing to frequently update in order to block these. There are also a few folks providing prebuilt GA filters that are also keep up to date by crowdsourcing - but still a manual process to update The filters in GA.

Hope that helps?

Paul