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
-
Internal Referral Traffic Issue due to https/http?
Hi Mozzers, we´re running a secured https account section on our website including a messaging center where lots of non secured own URLs are being shared among the users. Is there a possibility that a user clicking on one of the shared URLs within the https section triggering another session thats been counted as direct traffic? Thanks for your help! Greets
Reporting & Analytics | | LocalIM
Manson0 -
Bing Referral Traffic
We do not get referral traffic from Google, only organic. Why do we get both organic and referral traffic from Bing?
Reporting & Analytics | | Mike.Bean0 -
Referral exclusion not working with GTM?
Hi, how are you?
Reporting & Analytics | | arielbortz
I have my website with Google Tag Manager implemented. Google Analytics is one of the tags I have configured. The problem is that Referral exclusions aren't working for me. I excluded 3 domains, and I keep seeing them in my Referral Traffic report.
Any idea why this could be happening? Best wishes,
Ariel g04tIqv IrzKXiY0 -
Identifying Bots in Google Analytics
Hi there, While you can now filter out bots and spiders in Google Analytics, I'm interested in how you identify a bots and spiders in the first place. For example, it used to be thought that Googlebot wouldn't appear in GA as it 'couldn't process Javascript' but now Google has announced new developments for its crawler with regards to interpreting javascript and CSS, this argument isn't as cut and dry. I'm not suggesting Googlebot appears in Google Analytics, but I am saying that you can't make the case that it won't appear only because it can't interpret JavaScript. So, I'm interested to see what metrics you use to identify a bot? For me, the mix of Users > Browser, Users > Operating System Version is still quite handy, but is it possible to identify individual bots and spiders within Google Analytics? And would Googlebot appear?
Reporting & Analytics | | ecommercebc0 -
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 -
Filter out IP address of Site Search analytics
Hi Mozzers, I have a filter that excludes all internal traffic from my sites. But this does not seem to work on site search > Search Terms See here:- http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/analytics/filter$20site$20search/analytics/pO18L31hEO4/tJ3lKVNT3YYJ Any ideas? Or is it a bug, etc Thanks S
Reporting & Analytics | | Metropolis0 -
What is this referrer site?
Hi Guys....i keep seeing this in my analytics..can someone tell me what it is? 146w.bay146.mail.live.com thanks for your time
Reporting & Analytics | | nomad-2023230 -
How to measure number of visits from Google News coming from Google Universal Search (NOT referral coming directly coming from news.google.com) with google analyitcs
I'm running a news site, and I have a problem of accuratly measuring which traffic is REALLY coming from google news. I analyzed a lot of individual articles and I come to the conclusion, that the visits, that come from the google news section in the universal search results are counted as "normal" search engine traffic in google analytics. So if you do a Google search for a topic that includes links from Google news, you don't get an accurate referral count. As an example, if you do a search for "eBay", incorporated into the page 1 search results you may also see Google news results as well.
Reporting & Analytics | | Mulle
If someone clicks on that Google news link that appears in Google search, it shows up in Google analytics as a referral from Google search, when it was actually from a Google news referral. I was already checking google analytics and google news help forums and searched SEO blogs for this. But I wasn't able to find a working solution. Can anybody help me out with this problem? Thanks so much, Matthias0