How a Analytics Tool Aids in Removing Spam from your Analyti

1. How a Analytics Tool Aids in Removing Spam from your Analytics reports Referrer spam has been the new nightmare for people who are relying heavily on analytics reports to take stock of the traffic they receive on their website from various sources. The problem or headache may become severe in case the business owner is buying traffic from affiliate sources or even running goggle adwords. Referrer spam is a new kind of spam that has recently appeared on the Internet. Let’s find a solution - analytics spam solution to stop it and protect the quality of your analytics data. What is Referrer Spam? Referrer spam which is also known as log spam is a kind of spamming aimed at web analytics tools. A spammer bot makes repeated web site requests using a fake referrer URL to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Here are some well know spammers that you may have seen in your logs: buttons-for-you-website.com, best-seo-offer.com, semalt.com.

2. The main reason for spam is to benefit the spammer. Their website will appear in analytics tools like Google Analytics: • Public analytics reports or logs will be indexed by search engines: and these links will improve their ranking • Curious webmasters are likely to visit their referrers, thus bringing traffic to the spammer’s website How to identify the Referrer Spam type As you can stop all referrer spam using filters, sometimes is good to identify the type to use one of the other methods. The main difference is the hostname they use. Ghosts use a fake hostname since they don’t know actually how they are targeting; on the other hand, Crawlers use your domain name. How to stop Referrer Spam There are a few ways to stop Referrer Spam there is no best no worst it all depends on the type of Referrer Spam and your needs. Ghost Spam can only be stopped within Google Analytics with filters. On the other hand, you can stop Crawler Referrer Spam from the .htaccess file or with filters.

3. Change your tracking ID: - This method doesn’t exactly block Referrer Spam, but it makes your Google Analytics less visible to them. Is a good option for fresh Websites. Since this kind of Spam usually targets UA-XXXXXXX-1 ID’s, if you change your Google Analytics tracking ID for one that does not end. Using the .htaccess file: This file controls the access your site. It is useful to block Crawler Referrer Spam like semalt.com or buttons-for-website.com. Don’t try to use it for Ghost Referrer Spam because it won’t have any effect since we already know this kind of referrer never accesses your site. Conclusion: Referrer Spam affects many of us to a greater or lesser extent and it shouldn’t be taken lightly. For a quick action it is ok to set a filter to stop the referral using Campaign source. However I strongly recommend you to use the Valid Hostname filter. Although it requires more time and analysis to set it up, you won’t have to worry about future occurrences of ghost spam in any of its forms, referral, keyword and even the hard to detect fake direct visits. Article Resource: https://minusbots.wordpress.com/2015/05/30/how-a-analytics-tool-aids-in-removing-spam-from-your-analytics-reports/