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I'm currently developing a web application on localhost and Thursday I integrated the google analytics trackingcode on the application. I closed my localhost on Thursday night and returned this morning to see there were 71 sessions on Friday, 41 Saturday and 25 on Sunday.

You can see the referrals below. Note that the total sessions here are not the same as the ones on the overview page(!) referrals overview

Note that my localhost apache server was not on Friday, Saturday and Sunday (although my computer was).

Is there anyone with an idea on how this is possible?

Gregory
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    It's easy to send data randomly to Google Analytics Accounts, it doesn't have to go via your web page. You should be able to exclude this via a hostname filter (this has been discussed to death on SO and elsewhere so I suggest you Google "referral spam" and related). – Eike Pierstorff May 04 '15 at 07:28
  • Ok, I had no idea. Thank you – Gregory May 04 '15 at 07:37

3 Answers3

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These are not real visits, there is no interaction with your web app whatsoever. This spam hits directly Google Analytics and adds fake data, that's why are they showing even you have your site in the localhost.

The only way to stop them is from GA with filters. This Isuue has been very active last few months a new Spammer shows up frequently. Here are some related questions about Referrer Spam in SO:

And here is a similar problem with a person that got hit even his website was not out yet. https://superuser.com/questions/895219/google-analytics-spam-referral

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Carlos Escalera Alonso
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It's normal . It's not exactly your " localhost " but others localhost .

Youssef Saih
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If you look at the names of the sites listed in source I think you will find this is referral spam.

Normally we say there are three types of junk visits:

  1. Ghost referrals like the darodar / ilovevitaly / cenoval
  2. Creepy crawlers like semalt (a.k.a. best-seo-solution.com) and fake referrals like maridan.com.ua and blog.ranksonic.com.
  3. Well behaved bots and spiders

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 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

  1. Idea of how its done google+ post
  2. Tip: It appears that they are currently only targeting Web Property 1. so if you say make UA--xxxx-2 there will be no spam inserted.

More info on the other two can be found in this question.

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Linda Lawton - DaImTo
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