One reason why your Google Analytics data is not correct and how to fix it
Hello. This is Michelle Castillo with Spot On Digital Marketing and today I would like to cover an issue that creates wrong information in the Google Analytics of website owners. To demonstrate a problem, I’m looking at Acquisition- All Traffic- Channels on one of my website’s Google Analytics account. Here we can see different channels and the amount of traffic that they bring to y site. Let’s dig into the referral traffic which is supposingly the traffic that comes from other websites to my website via normally a hyperlink. When I first saw the numbers I was very excited. In one single month I had 229 visits coming from so many different websites. But, taking a closer look showed me that actually there are no hyperlinks to my website on these websites.
Further investigation made me aware of the phenomenon that is called ‘Referral Spam’. In fact, the owners of these websites somehow managed to trick Google Analytics and convince it that they route traffic to my website while in fact nothing of that nature really happens. I’m not sure why they’re doing it. Some say that this is their way to drive traffic to their website. Nevertheless it is important is to be aware of this issue and do as much as possible to eliminate it.
The first tool I would like to show is the Google Analytics’ filters, which allow you to filter out traffic for different reasons. We will use it to filter out referrer spam. For that purpose I will click on the Admin button and here I can see the three levels that every website that you have in Google Analytics has:
1. The account name - this is the name you gave it when you created the account
2. The property - typically the Domain Name
3. The View - when you first create a Google Analytics account by default there is a view which is called ‘All Website Data’ and it includes absolutely all the information that is being tracked.
I usually do not want to apply filters to this view. Just in case my filter was not well defined then the ‘All Website Data’ view keeps absolutely everything. Note that when you apply a filter, Google Analytics does not even record information that is being filtered out and so you may lose some important information. I will create another view by clicking ‘Create New View’ here and I will just call it ‘My New View’, set up the reporting Time Zone and create a View.
Now that I have a new view the first step is to take a look at the settings screen. Here there is one thing that I recommend doing always and this is to check the ‘Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders’. This is relatively a new feature that Google Analytics added about a year ago which tells Google Analytics to eliminate all traffic from spammers that they’re aware of.
The next step is to create our first filter. Let’s click on ‘Filters’ and add a new filter. We give it a name and we then will use the custom filter option. Our filter will exclude specific websites defined by “Campaign Source” field. I’m going to paste here a pattern that defines all the known websites that drive spam traffic to our site nowadays. You can find the string be under this video. You can just copy and paste it into your filter and once this is done we just click on ‘Save’ and we are all set; we have a new filter.
As I said before, the filter is going to work only from now going forward so you can come back in a week and check out how it impacted what you see in Google Analytics.
While the filter we have created fixes the Google Analytics Report, it actually only masks the problem. The referrer spammers are still going to hit your website and this can create other problems. Another solution is to stop them at the source and there are different ways to do it. I don’t want to go into all of them but if you’re a WordPress website owner, there are quite a few plugins that will do just that. I’ve never used any of those plugins so far and today I’m going to install one. I’m looking at what WordPress has to offer in the free Plugin repository and I’ve decided to use the “Bot Block” because it seems to be updated very often, it has more than one thousand active installs and it has pretty good reviews.
After installing the plugin, there is a new screen here under settings, which is called Bot Block Options. I’m just going to leave everything as the default and I’m just going to check it in few days and see how it’s going.
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