Is ghost referral spam screwing up your Google analytics data? Fed up seeing spammy sites like darodar, semalt, floating-share-buttons.com and www.event-tracking.com in your list of referrers? Well, you’re not alone. Referral spam is the bain of most webmasters at the moment and has been getting steadily worse over the past year (obviously making money for someone somewhere). But fear not, Alex An Actionable Dealy of loganix.net has the complete solution to your referral spam nightmare – ensuring none of those annoying spammers slip through the net and that your stats remain clean and accurate. Over to Alex… Spam has evolved.
It’s not just an
Inbox & search engine problem anymore. It’s found its way into your Google Analytics account. Just like how spammers will bend to the lowest denominator to try to company data squeeze into your email inbox, they’ve picked up on flaws in the system to show up in data reports. Why? With the dimmest glimmer of hope that you’ll wonder what the hell they’re doing in your report and visit their website out of curiosity. Lame, right? Tell me about it! It makes data a mess—for both my personal sites and client’s sites that I work with at The Magistrate. But, moar web traffic? The thing is, these bots never actually visit your site. They manage to only just tickle the javascript that Google Analytics uses to notify you when a visitor normally views a page.
If you’re making
Big content marketing investments based on these numbers, it’s important that they’re as accurate as they can be. This has made ghost and referral spam traffic a EJ Leads big problem for: Small businesses and solopreneurs Medium businesses with no dedicated marketer Marketing Agencies small and large And the kicker? An Actionable These agents of Voldemort work fast. Real fast. Not only are the numbers of hits from spam increasing everyday, but so are the sources that have to be blacklisted and eliminated. We’ve even seen referral spammers try such nonsensical techniques as trying to disguise themselves as Google. Why? Who knows? Here is what we see on our side: It’s particularly troubling if your site is relatively new and is not yet getting much legitimate web traffic.
