GOOGLE ANALYTIC SKEWED DATA BECAUSE OF GHOST REFERRAL SPAM ND CRAWL BOTS

[KristyKK]

Hi Guys,

We are having some major problems with our Google Analytics and MOz account. Due to the large number of ghost/referral spam and crawler bots we have added some heavy filtering to GA. This seems to be working protecting the data from all these problems but also filtering out much needed data that is not coming through. In example, we used to get a hundred visitors a day at the least and now we are down to under ten.

ANYBODY PLEASE HELP. HAVE READ THROUGH MANY ARTICLES WITH NO FIND TO PERMANENT SOLID SOLUTION (even willing to go with paid service instead of GA)

Thank You so Much,

S.M.

[solvid]

As I understand, you get referral traffic from websites like; traffic-cash and those with .xyz extension.

There is a great article on how to filter those: https://www.ohow.co/what-is-referrer-spam-how-stop-it-guide/

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I wonder what kind of bots or crawlers you were seeing before because we have millions of visitors in our analytics set-ups, no filters to filter them out and we barely see any traffic coming from browsers or hostnames that may be identified as such.

[Kapelski]

You may have already tried this (https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-and-other-google-analytics-spam) as I believe it is one of the more common articles, but it suggests setting up a filter to use hostnames and testing it with a segment. This has worked well for us. You have to be careful and make sure you use ALL the relevant hostnames and that your expression doesn't contain errors.

[Jono_M]

What filters do you have setup?

Generally, I prefer to set up two views on an Analytics property, one containing all of the data, and one with filters. This way if the filtered data is looking lower than expected, there's still the complete view to compare against. It also makes it easy to test the efficacy of the filters that were created.