Semalt: Excluding Ghost Referral Spam From Google Analytics

1. 23.05.2018 Semalt: Excluding Ghost Referral Spam From Google Analytics Google Analytics is a free and reliable tool that website owners can use to retrieve traf?c data and make reports out of them with much ef?ciency. Over the years, ever since 2005 when Google acquired Urchin, it has become a powerful web analytics tools. Webmasters use it to monitor their online campaigns and determine their conversion rates, implement website optimization measure, and keep a track report of their e-commerce activities. Nevertheless, the presence of referral spam can quickly undermine the accuracy of this bulk data. Artem Abgarian, the Senior Customer Success Manager of Semalt, de?nes here some ways and methods of removing referral spam from Google Analytics. These Are Not The Bots You Are Looking For Referral spam is a technique used by people seeking to get free backlinks to their sites. The traf?c from these sources is also known as "Ghost referrals" since no actual humans are behind the visits. Referral spam tends to in?ate the present organic traf?c statistics, which has negative implications for the conversion and engagement rates of the site. What happens is that ghost referral domains appear on the Google Analytics traf?c report, yet nobody made the visit to the site. Spambots are behind the scraping of the Google Analytics the tracking code. They then use it to send traf?c directly to the tool for analysis. In short, ghost referrals bypass. It is easy to spot and remove referral https://rankexperience.com/articles/article1634.html 1/2

2. 23.05.2018 spam domains since they have excessive and unnatural traf?c and visit sessions. Referral spam has one objective which only bene?ts the spammer. The idea is to trick the site owner by hoping that their curiosity to know where the bulk of traf?c comes from will get them to click on their URL. Once one clicks the URL provided in the GA report, it redirects back to their site and records as organic traf?c from their side. Currently, there are claims that Google is working on a permanent solution to dealing with referral spam. In the meantime, there are measures to put in place within Google Analytics, to minimize their prevalence on GA reports. The most useful one per se is the inbuilt ?lters that Google Analytics has in place. They do not necessarily remove referral spam, but they give the user a chance to get a more accurate image of their site's performance. They are only view-level ?lters. Select Filters from the Admin section in GA and "Create a new ?lter." Once here, choose from the two plans of action options: #1 Destroy anything with more than 15 symbols #1 Destroy anything with more than 15 symbols It uses a regular expression to reject any domains with 15 characters or more. It may not remove referral spam to entirety but serves as a good place to start. Give the new ?lter a name like "ghostbuster" and make it a prede?ned type of ?lter. Choose to exclude, and insert ".{15,}|\s[^\s]*\s|\.|,|\!|\" in the ?lter pattern. Save the ?lter. #2 Remove speci?c domains #2 Remove speci?c domains It involves creating custom ?lters to get rid of particular links which can be very tedious if they are several. However, in the end, it will be worthwhile. The only drawback is identifying the spammy domains. Give the ?lter a new name like ghostbuster (campaign source). It is a prede?ned type and then selects "Exclude." Enter the suspicious domains in the ?lter ?eld separated by a "\" and save. https://rankexperience.com/articles/article1634.html 2/2