undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • MozCon
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
    Moz Pro

    Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

    Try it free!
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Digital Marketers

      Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Reporting & Analytics
  4. Direct traffic spam on Google Analytics: how can you identify and filter it?

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Direct traffic spam on Google Analytics: how can you identify and filter it?

Reporting & Analytics
5
6
5.6k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • RosemaryB
    RosemaryB last edited by Jul 28, 2015, 9:19 PM

    One of my smaller clients noticed a huge jump in direct traffic visits last month.  The bounce rate was around 97% so I'm pretty certain that most of the traffic was illegitimate.  I know how to filter out spam referrals and organic keywords in Google Analytics.  However I'm not sure what to do about direct traffic spam.  Are there recommendations for filtering this out?  Can I identify spam IP addresses?

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • OptiBacUK
      OptiBacUK @RosemaryB last edited by Jul 29, 2015, 7:41 PM Jul 29, 2015, 7:41 PM

      Can you add a secondary dimension of medium and upload another screenshot? You will be able to cut out a large number of spam visits when you so that.

      Essentially you will end up with hostname (not set) having medium of referral and medium of none.

      Upload a screenshot and I may be in a better place to advise

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • RosemaryB
        RosemaryB @Travis_Bailey last edited by Jul 29, 2015, 2:08 PM Jul 29, 2015, 2:04 PM

        I was looking for spam hostnames however a large volume of traffic coming to my clients website is from "not set" hostnames.  I have feeling the (not set) hostname includes spammers.  Do you know what else I can do about this?

        95LPe1w.jpg

        OptiBacUK 1 Reply Last reply Jul 29, 2015, 7:41 PM Reply Quote 0
        • BradsDeals
          BradsDeals @Travis_Bailey last edited by Jul 29, 2015, 11:42 AM Jul 29, 2015, 11:42 AM

          Yep, hostname is where I would start looking as well. Also geographic segments like country and region if your site is targeting only a particular country/state/city.

          And building on what Brett is saying, find a list of common nuisance bots and block them via robots.txt. That may help as well.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Brett-Harland
            Brett-Harland last edited by Jul 29, 2015, 8:06 AM Jul 29, 2015, 8:06 AM

            Hello Rosemary,

            Couple of things to check in GA under view settings under admin make sure Bot filtering is checked. Also under the menu in filtering you can add and IP exclusion list (from other office locations for example). Further you can add websites that you do not want referral traffic to be recording from this can be done under property/tracking info/ referral exclusion list

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Travis_Bailey
              Travis_Bailey last edited by Jul 28, 2015, 10:18 PM Jul 28, 2015, 10:18 PM

              Create a segment that only shows traffic to the hostname. (yoursite.com, youtube.com, paypal.com) That's it. It's pretty amazing how much traffic would appear to be spam.

              BradsDeals RosemaryB 2 Replies Last reply Jul 29, 2015, 2:04 PM Reply Quote 0
              • 1 / 1
              1 out of 6
              • First post
                1/6
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • fishlizzer

                Direct Traffic from Ashburn, VA

                We've seen a huge spike in traffic form Ashburn, VA every Monday. It's wrecking our analytics. I don't want to create a filter based on location because we should receive legitimate traffic from that location. I see there are a few other identifiers that make me think I could add a filter for just those items (iOS 5, Safari). Does anyone have a current best-practice for this type of problem? Tx!

                Reporting & Analytics | Feb 5, 2016, 4:00 PM | fishlizzer
                2
              • amichaels

                Google Analytics SEO Queries Not Showing

                Hi All, This might be a silly question, but for all the properties I monitor in Google Analytics, I'm now showing no data for SEO Queries under Acquisition for the past 6 days. Normally I would expect a few day delay in queries, but nothing for 6 days is somewhat peculiar especially as it was functioning fine prior to November 12th. Does anyone have insight into what might be going on? Thanks! URaNMa3

                Reporting & Analytics | Jan 23, 2016, 5:27 AM | amichaels
                0
              • KarlMarxTheBear

                Google Analytics Real Time Not Working! :(

                Hello Everyone, Today, the real time feature in my google analytics stopped working. I am able to see that traffic is visiting my site, but not in real time. The real time count is usually at 0. But, there are some instances where real time will come back online, but there will be only 1 unique visitor.  At any given time, our website usually has 20 visitors or so..Has anyone encountered this issue? Where should i start looking for fixes? What are the possible problems? Thanks!

                Reporting & Analytics | Jan 7, 2015, 7:30 AM | KarlMarxTheBear
                0
              • EcommerceSite

                How does switching to HTTPS effect Google Analytics?

                We are looking at making our site HTTPS. We have been using the same Google Analytics account for years and I like having the historical data. All of our pages will be the same, we are just going to redirect from the http to https. Does anything need to be done with Google Analytics? What about other addons such as Optimizely, Crazy Egg, or Share this?

                Reporting & Analytics | Sep 16, 2014, 7:50 PM | EcommerceSite
                0
              • BoomDialogue69

                How can we view traffic from specific Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit accounts in Google Analytics?

                Dear Moz Community, This is a Google Analytics question. Using Google Analytics, we're trying to identify trends of visitors on a website from specific social media accounts, i.e: twitter.com/account-x facebook.com/account-x youtube.com/account-x reddit.com/r/account-x Ideally, we would like to be able to see the success rate for specific posts on these social media accounts, and how users engaged on the website after arriving from clicking a link on one of these accounts. Is this drill-down feature currently possible in Google Analytics? Many thanks for helping!

                Reporting & Analytics | Aug 24, 2013, 2:27 AM | BoomDialogue69
                0
              • BigBlaze205

                Google Analytics - Keywords (not set) or ( not provided) WHY???

                In Analytics, most of my visitors are landing on my home page, but when trying to see wich keywords they use, most of them are: (not set) or ( not provided) See screencast: http://screencast.com/t/AKwPW76qLVsN Can you tell why? What is going on? Is there a way to solve this? Thank you, BigBlaze

                Reporting & Analytics | May 30, 2013, 4:33 AM | BigBlaze205
                0
              • Darden

                Google Analytics and DNS change

                Our new alumni application is going be tested at domain uva.imodules.com .  We are going to collect traffic data with a Google analytics account number UA-884652-XX. So going to uva.imodules.com/myPage.html would send its data to Google Analytics with that account number.     Then when it is ready for production we are going to just change the domain name of the application and switch the DNS over to dardencommunity.darden.virginia.edu .  So going to dardencommunity.darden.virginia.edu /myPage.html would send its data to  Google Analtics with that SAME account number.  Aside from having the testing domain data in the same profile are there any other issues/problems we may run into?

                Reporting & Analytics | Jan 25, 2013, 7:44 PM | Darden
                0
              • pwpaneuro

                No Social Sources in Google Analytics - what am I doing wrong?

                Hello Everyone, I'm having a strange issue: I DO NOT have in my Google Analytics the "Social" tab under the Traffic Sources category. Look at the first image of this post: http://marketingland.com/google-analytics-social-reports-8138 How do you "get" that to show? Hope somebody has this issue and can help, Thanks a lot, Alex

                Reporting & Analytics | Apr 5, 2012, 5:24 AM | pwpaneuro
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              • Digital Marketers
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.