Filters for referral bots ineffective

[everestagency]

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:

http://imgur.com/a/SVvEA#0

And here is referral traffic from them regardless:

http://imgur.com/a/SVvEA#1

Specifically this is what the filter looks like. Am I doing something wrong here?

http://imgur.com/a/SVvEA#2

I have also put a filter in place to block traffic from Russia, and it doesn't seem to be working 100% either.

http://imgur.com/a/SVvEA#3

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.

[everestagency]

Thank you for the quick response. Made the changes you suggested and hopefully over the next few days I'll see the effect.

[Carloseo]

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,

[everestagency]

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?

[TimHolmes]

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.

[Carloseo]

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,

[everestagency]

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

[marceldigital]

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