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I am sure many of you have found fake referral traffic in your google analytics reports/views. This makes it difficult for low to medium traffic sites to have accurate data for marketing. I am wondering what others are doing to exclude this traffic from their analytics reports.

If you go to your analytics account and go to acquisition -> all traffic -> referrals you will see sites like floating-share-buttons.com. These are the sites I want to filter out. Which you can do by setting up a custom filter for the view as described at the bottom of this page. I have done this and it works.

I would rather block these bots from hitting the site all together. Just a note: my sites are running as web apps in azure.

I am not sure if setting up url rewrite rules described here will work in azure apps or if this will mess with the existing url rewrite functions of the Content Management System I am using (DotNetNuke DNN platform 7).

I am really just looking to hear what others have done to block bots rather than than setting up filters in the analytics view's settings.

Thanks

PS

for those who are interested, this is the current filter list I am using:

webmonetizer\.net|trafficmonetizer\.org|success-seo\.com|event-tracking\.com|Get-Free-Traffic-Now\.com|buttons-for-website\.com|4webmasters\.org|floating-share-buttons\.com|free-social-buttons\.com|e-buyeasy\.com
J King
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2 Answers2

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With regards to this issue, there are a number of things that you can do. You are going the route that I see most commonly used and that is to block the information using the filters in Google Analytics.

You can go the route of an IIS Filter as well, just like you have linked. DNN's Friendly URL's will not necessarily be impacted by this as they are processed BEFORE DNN gets the request. There is a marginal performance impact by having two things process re-writes, but nothing to be concerned about until incredibly high user volume.

This is also a great collection of options.

Mitchel Sellers
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  • Thanks, this is what I was looking for, an experienced DNN developer clarifying the issue for me. Cheers! – J King Jul 22 '15 at 15:01
  • The only other consideration is to review if these sites are actually loading your content. FOr example on MitchelSellers.com I had some funny pageviews etc...come to find out a spammer was loading my GA ID on their site and really messing with stuff. I had to simply block that root domain for content. – Mitchel Sellers Jul 22 '15 at 15:24
  • good point - not the case for me - all of the referral traffic I see are listed as common spam referral offenders. I am surprised google has not taken action on this from their end. – J King Jul 22 '15 at 15:28
  • You are lucky sir! That other stuff is even harder to kill! – Mitchel Sellers Jul 23 '15 at 03:39
  • @MitchelSellers, you can set a custom dimension in your page and exclude all traffic that does not have that dimension set. Spam traffic that hasn't visited your site will not have that dimension and will be summarily dismissed. – Eike Pierstorff Jul 27 '15 at 13:46
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First you need to know that there are mainly 2 types of spam affecting GA right now, Ghost and Crawlers.

The first(ghosts) never interacts with your page, so any server-side solutions like the HTTP rules or htaccess file won't have any effect and will only fill your config files with.

The crawlers as the name imply do access your website and can be blocked this way, but there are only a few of them compared with the ghost. To give you an Idea there are around 8 active crawlers while there are more than 100 ghosts and each week increasing.

This is because the ghost method is easier to implement for the spammers.

From your expression, only success-seo is a crawler. The rest should be filtered. Now there is a better way to get rid of all ghosts with just one filter based in your valid hostnames instead of creating of updating one every week.

You can find more information about the ghost spam and the solution here

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

https://moz.com/ugc/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter

Hope it helps.

Community
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Carlos Escalera Alonso
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    thanks carlos - the linked blogs helped clarify the source of these two types of spam. in addition, your own blog post about adding a segment to GA was quite valuable. – J King Jul 27 '15 at 17:39