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Like many others I suffered the fake referrals and spam stuff in my google analytics, I have put all the relevant filters in place and read the forums and tips, etc.

Everything seemed to settle down, but now I can see big spikes in real-time visits, like 25/35 all at once, just showing landing on my homepage, there is no 'fake' address showing up like before (free-share-buttons, you-porn.ga etc), nothing, just multiple visits all at once, the locations are spread across the world, but mostly in the USA, this seems to be happening once a day from what I can tell. What is causing this?

I'm actually at the point where I'm thinking, GA not even worth bothering with for a small business like mine, frustrating and just seem to be wasting precious time on stuff like this.

Anthon
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miles
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1 Answers1

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Fake direct visits are the latest form of attack from ghost spam, especially from free-share-buttons. If you catch it in real time you will see that this spammer(might be others) makes 1 referral hit with multiple fake direct visits (10 or more) at the same time.

The problem with the conventional methods is that they were excluding the source, in this case, the referrals, and while the referral will still be stopped, the fake direct visit will go through.

Fortunately, there is a way to prevent the direct visits along with the referral and any ghost spam form for that matter, like organic or pages.

What all ghost spam have in common is that they use a fake or not set hostname. Based on this if you create a filter that will include only valid hostnames you will get rid of all fake direct visits and ghost referrals with one filter.

You can find more information on these related questions about this issue and the valid hostname solution

https://stackoverflow.com/a/30470413/3197362

https://stackoverflow.com/a/28354319/3197362

Community
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Carlos Escalera Alonso
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  • Carlos thanks for your reply, I have now done an 'include' hostname filter, hopefully this will work. I'm just hoping that google actually sort this out, the more you look on forums its just a huge problem, if it continues I will just delete my GA account because the time I have spent on blocking fake results is just not worth it to my business, my time is better spent doing more productive things, any way, lets see, wait and hope :-)) – miles May 28 '15 at 07:54