Is there an efficient way to block/filter referral spam in Google Analytics for a large network of websites?

[copyjack]

Hello, everyone -

I'm looking for guidance on how to block or filter referral spam in Google Analytics. But I'm needing to block for an entire network of Wordpress websites. We have two networks which total over 2,500 websites. We are currently blocking sites we find out about via htaccess. This works, but only after we see we are getting hit with the spam. Updating 2,500+ Google Analytics accounts with filtering is not an ideal option due to the time factor and the fact that new bots coming out almost daily. We can continue the htaccess method, but does anyone have any other ideas for blocking referral spam for a large network of sites? These are the other ideas we have.

1. Blocking all traffic from Russia and China based up subnets. We know many will still get through, but it should block 50% of it, we hope.
2. Moving sites to Google Tag manager.  This is a huge tasks but we have seen that sites using Tag Manager are not effected, at least for now.

Other ideas are appreciated!

[DonnaDuncan]

I'm sympathetic Jackson. I wish there was a server-side solution but I haven't heard anyone chime in with one yet.

[copyjack]

Ditto. Thanks for the info, Dirk!

[copyjack]

Thanks for pointing me to the other Q&A, Donna.

We've tried most the techniques described in the thread. But I still haven't tried to segment the traffic based on valid hostnames. That sounds like a more efficient way to do it.

It will probably still be time-intensive with 2,500+ sites, but I don't know of any other way. I'm hoping that will take care of a good chunk of the spam referrals.

Thanks again!

[DonnaDuncan]

Good to know Dirk. Thanks!

[DirkC]

Just to add to the answer of Donna - migrating Analytics to the Tag manager is not going to help. They are equally affected (it's quite easy to retrieve the analytics id which is inside).

rgds,

Dirk

[DonnaDuncan]

Did you see this Q&A Jackson? I think a number of folks are using country filters.

Can't comment on tag manager. Maybe someone else can.