Something that is becoming increasingly problematic lately is Google Analytics Referral Spam.  Referral spam can wreak havoc with your Analytics stats, if left unchecked.

 

Referral spam occurs when your site gets fake referral traffic from spam bots and this fake traffic is recorded in your Google Analytics stats. This is something you need to be aware of, so that you can take steps to filter that traffic out.

The way you can check to see if you are a victim is to login to your Google Analytics account, select your site and scroll down on the left to…

Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Referrals.

If your results look similar to mine above, or you see odd sites that you wouldn’t think people would come from to visit your site, you are probably also being hit by Google Analytics Referral Spam.

The referral traffic page is supposed to show you the sites that people came to your website from, but every single one of those entries in the image above are spam.

The people that run those sites know how to get their URLs to show up in your Google Analytics data.  Their intent can range from deceptive to malicious. In most cases their goal is to get you to visit their website, which is exactly what I did initially.

Based on the majority of the entries, it looked like I was being targeted by law enforcement for some reason, so I clicked over to one of the links and it had to do with the new EU cookie policy.

The site looked legitimate and on the main page it talked about the new EU cookie requirements and they provided some code that you can copy/paste into your own website to be sure you are “compliant”.

Of course, I did NOT do that and right afterwards I searched Google for the different websites in the list and found out it was all spam.

The good news is that from what I read, in most cases, those sites are not actually hitting your website.  They just show up in your stats as if it is legitimate traffic.

However, you can clearly see that they hinder your ability to see your actual traffic and they really skew your numbers.

You definitely want to do what you can to filter that fake traffic out, so that you can get to the real data.

The primary way that I saw recommended most often was to setup filters in Google Analytics.

The way you do that is as follows…

How to Filter Out Google Analytics Referral Spam

The primary sites that were showing up in my stats over the last several months were as follows.

Your specific results will be different, so you’ll need to plug in the sites you see in your own data, but the steps will be the same.

Referral Spam Websites:

monetizationking.net

rank-checker.online

cookie-law-enforcement-hh.xyz

cookie-law-enforcement-hh.xyz

cookie-law-enforcement-ii.xyz

eu-cookie-law-enforcement-7.xyz

cookie-law-enforcement-dd.xyz

cookie-law-enforcement-gg.xyz

law-enforcement-check-three.xyz

law-enforcement-dd.xyz

social-buttons-hh.xyz

fix-website-errors.com

keywords-monitoring-success.com

free-video-tool.com

magicdiet.gq

ownshop.cf

site-auditor.online

First, login to your Google Analytics account and then click on Admin at the top, select your site from the drop down list and then click on All Filters.

Then click the option to Add Filter.

Each individual filter can have a maximum of 255 characters, so I actually needed to create 3 separate ones.  I named them spam bots 1-3.

For Filter Type, choose Custom.  For Filter Field, select Campaign Source.  For filter pattern, type in each URL that shows up in your stats with each one separated by a “|”.

Then towards the bottom, select All Website Data under available views,