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

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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.

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

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  • KristyKK
    KristyKK last edited by Mar 10, 2016, 3:42 PM

    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.

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • solvid
      solvid last edited by Mar 11, 2016, 7:00 PM Mar 11, 2016, 7:00 PM

      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/

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Martijn_Scheijbeler
        Martijn_Scheijbeler last edited by Mar 11, 2016, 7:29 AM Mar 11, 2016, 7:29 AM

        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.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Kapelski
          Kapelski last edited by Mar 11, 2016, 2:12 AM Mar 11, 2016, 2:12 AM

          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.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Jono_M
            Jono_M last edited by Mar 10, 2016, 8:48 PM Mar 10, 2016, 8:48 PM

            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.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
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