I'm surprise to see statistics in Google Analytics page for one of the Android app and noticed the following strange informations
Apple iPhone in Top Device Models
Strange OS names entry in OS Versions :
Note:
I have answered the the current possible solution, but that doesn't make corrections to the available old data sets please let me know any ways to correct the old data sets and get out of the cons mentioned in my answer!
Bots and referral spam are two different things, the answer you posted will only help with bots. I am going to refer to the article about removing referral spam here
Normally we say there are three types of junk visits:
Issue Number 1
I suspect data being inserted directly into the Analytics account directly though the measurement protocol. I say this because I have several old Google analytics accounts that are showing hits, the websites for these accounts no longer exist and haven't existed in years. I also have an old application account like yours that no longer has any data sent to it that shows data daily. The only way for data to be inserted into them is if someone is doing it directly, the hits are coming from known referral spam sites (the big list). There has been a lot of talk on the net lately on how to deal with the first two problems. Google has not come with any solution as of my writing this. The article gives a few very good ways of dealing with it. here
Issue Number 2:
This will be hard to detect, they are actually thing your site. A filter on the known bad crawlers helps.
Issue Number 3
The answer you posted is correct but will only help with this: Bot and Spider Filtering. Its also kind of old.
Note: I have answered my own question for Bot and Spider Filtering , please provide if any better solution for the Cons mentioned below and avoid referral spam
Google Analytics Google team announced Introducing Bot and Spider Filtering to get away with referral spams,bots in Analytics Entries !
Introducing Bot and Spider Filtering
Many of you have shared with us that it’s hard to identify the real traffic that comes to your pages. That’s why I’m pleased to announce that we’re adding bot and spider filtering.
You can simply select a new checkbox option which would be included in the view level of the management user interface. This option would be labeled "Exclude traffic from known bots and spiders". Selecting this option will exclude all hits that come from bots and spiders on the IAB know bots and spiders list. The backend will exclude hits matching the User Agents named in the list as though they were subject to a profile filter. This will allow you to identify the real number of visitors that are coming to your site.
Nestlé has been testing it and has found great benefit:
“The Bot filter solution is essential for getting deeper insights. View level availability let us stay fully aligned with Best Practices provided to all site owners. Very easy to use, understand and communicate across thousands of Google Analytics users.” ~ Katarzyna Malik, Nestlé Google Analytics Specialist
Happy Analyzing!
Posted by Matthew Anderson, Google Analytics Team
Steps to enable Bot Filtering:
Go Google Analytics home page and click on the Admin tab.Click on View settings
select Bot Filtering to get rid of known bots and spiders option.
This will remove the spam hits from their analytics for only upcoming analytics data. So this solution has two cons!!
Cons:
Historical data will not be affected by this option, i.e. spam hits which were made in the past will remain in your data, Google will only filter your future hits.
Google promises to remove hits from known bots, which means that the time from the new bot appearance to the moment when it will be included in the Google filter list can be indefinitely long. I use this solution for the last week though and didn't find any new bots breaking through the filter
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