Articles on referral spam

Future-Proofing Against Google Analytics Spam

A Spammer's View of the GA Home Report

Some two years after it gained prominence Google Analytics spam is all the rage again with one or several notorious spammers finding their way into hundreds of thousands of Google Analytics accounts in order to bring attention to stuff the spammer or his/her associates are making money off. The new wave started around Nov 8, […] Read more…

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Language Spam – The Latest Google Analytics Spam

Google Analytics Homepage Spam

In the past 2 weeks we are witnessing a new wave of Google Analytics Spam – language spam and in this post I’ll outline what it is, how it happens and how you can protect your GA accounts from it (to some extent). We first started seeing it on Nov 8, just as the 2016 […] Read more…

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Google Analytics Spam & What To Do About It

Google Analytics Spam

It’s now 2016 and Google Analytics Spam is on the rise again. Following the holidays many webmasters and site owners opened Google Analytics, only to see something like this: Namely, their source/medium stats are once again polluted with irrelevant referral spam. The new “star” on the block is definitely с.новым.годом.рф, while the .xyz TLD continues to […] Read more…

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Google Analytics Referral Spam Explained in 5 minutes – Infographic

The infographic below is our 5 minute guide to Google Analytics referrer spam. In it we cover what’s the effect of spam on your stats & reports, why does it happen, how exactly does it happen and what are 4 main approaches to dealing with it. The infographic contains descriptions of the two ways referral […] Read more…

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Updates to the Google Analytics Audit tool

We’ve pushed several small updates to our Google Analytics Audit tool in the past several days. The number of different types of checks performed by the “Check Health Status” tool has now reached 31 (from 22 a year and a half ago)! The two most recent changes include checking for individual pages with unrealistically low bounce […] Read more…

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Auto Spam Filters – GA Referrer Spam: SOLVED

Stop GA Spam

I am very happy to announce today the launch of a new tool in Analytics-Toolkit.com called Auto Spam Filters. What is does is it takes care of pretty much all Google Analytics referrer spam & ghost traffic issues you might be having. All on it’s own in a fully-automated fashion and using a spam database […] Read more…

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Guide to Removing Referrer Spam in Google Analytics

Stop Referrer Spam

This article deals with the problem of Google Analytics referrer spam (prominent referral spammers are semalt, darodar, buttons-for-website). I explain why and how it actually happens, why currently proposed solutions fail and I describe a working, albeit not perfect solution for the issue. Contents (click to jump to that part): The problem of Google Analytics referrer spam […] Read more…

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