Referral Spam in Google Analytics

One of the most important factors in online marketing strategies is being able to measure the results of your campaigns. Without this ability you have no idea whether your efforts are successfully drawing in a new audience to your website. Probably the best known and most widely used tool for this job is Google Analytics. For those who aren’t familiar with Google Analytics it is free service provided by Google to measure visitors to your website. Basically you set up an Analytics account, add some code to your website and the next day you are able to log in to your control panel and see how many visitors you had the previous day. It also provides lots of useful metrics on things like where your site visitors are coming from, which pages they visit before leaving, how long they stay on your site for and more.

Lately however there has been a bit of a set back. Over the last year there has been a continued rise in referral spam. This is the practice of bots visiting your site with the intention of being recognised by Google Analytics as a Referral visitor. As you can see in the image below, when you are viewing your website referral traffic you are shown the URL of where your visitors are coming from.

 

 

If you are unfamiliar with Referral spam then your natural reaction is to look at the web page that is redirecting traffic to you to find out how it works. At this point I’m not sure what the Spammers thinking is. Are you supposed to be so blown away by their clever ruse that you immediately sign up for their services? I would assume that most people were more likely to think “Hmm, these guys look dodgy. I’ not going to touch them with a barge pole.” Nevertheless it must work for some people and as it is very cheap for the spammers to do then a fraction of a percentage convert then it is worth them continuing with this strategy.

So how can we deal with these annoying bots? One thing you can do is go through the process of setting up a filter for the offending domain name. However new referral spam is created so often that you are likely to find yourself carrying out this Sisyphean task on a daily basis.

A quick fix is to look at your traffic in the Acquisitions Overview as seen in the image below and simply ignore the referral data.

 

 

Unless of course you are expecting a lot of referral traffic in which case you’ll have to enter that specific section and ignore the obvious spammy titles such as traffic2money.com and seobuttons.com. After all if you are running a campaign from which you are expecting referral traffic then you’re probably going to know the website that it’s going to be coming from.

However these solutions are of course not ideal. Unfortunately Google is currently powerless to stop referral spam at the root but hopefully this will change in the near future.