But fear not, Alex Dealy of loganix.net has the complete solution to your referral spam nightmare - ensuring none of those annoying spammers slip through the net and that your stats remain clean and accurate.<\/p>\n
Over to Alex\u2026<\/p>\n
What\u2019s Ghost and Referral Spam Traffic and Why Does it Suck?<\/h2>\n
Spam has evolved. It\u2019s not just an inbox & search engine problem anymore. It\u2019s found its way into your Google Analytics account. Just like how spammers will bend to the lowest denominator to try to squeeze into your email inbox, they\u2019ve picked up on flaws in the system to show up in data reports.<\/p>\n
Why<\/i>?<\/p>\n
With the dimmest glimmer of hope that you\u2019ll wonder what the hell they\u2019re doing in your report and visit their website out of curiosity.<\/p>\n
Lame, right<\/i>?<\/p>\n
Tell me about it! It makes data a mess\u2014for both my personal sites and client\u2019s sites that I work with at The Magistrate<\/a>.<\/p>\n But, moar web traffic<\/i>?<\/p>\n The thing is, these bots never actually visit your site.<\/p>\n They manage to only just tickle the javascript that Google Analytics uses to notify you when a visitor normally views a page.<\/p>\n They can still really skew your analytics numbers, including key stats like bounce rate<\/a> and other engagement metrics.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re making big content marketing investments based on these numbers, it\u2019s important that they\u2019re as accurate as they can be.<\/p>\n This has made ghost and referral spam traffic a big problem for:<\/p>\n And the kicker? These agents of Voldemort work fast. Real fast.<\/p>\n Not only are the numbers of hits from spam increasing everyday, but so are the sources that have to be blacklisted and eliminated.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve even seen referral spammers try such nonsensical techniques as trying to disguise themselves as Google. Why? Who knows?<\/p>\n Here is what we see on our side:<\/p>\n It\u2019s particularly troubling if your site is relatively new and is not yet getting much legitimate web traffic. The spam percentages are much higher, and will skew your data much more than if your site has thousands of hits a day.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s an example of a personal site of mine. I haven\u2019t paid much attention to it, so it doesn\u2019t get a lot of hits. But with a quick look at the orange segment, you can see that only 80% of the traffic recorded in Analytics is legitimate. 20% is spam traffic!<\/p>\n The bottom line is that you need clean data to make informed decisions about your website. And to do that, you need to address and clean up this mess.<\/p>\n Start now, because they are only going to improve their game.<\/p>\n A single referrer record in analytics is a single \u201cpage load\u201d<\/p>\n Under normal circumstances, that\u2019s someone loading your page and all the other assets your page contains including images, css, javascript libraries & tracking. Ghost spammers avoid all the mess and just fire off a single javascript tracking code to google thereby forging a visit that never actually shows up.<\/p>\n That tracking \u201cpage load\u201d took 0.001 seconds on a server somewhere. At the same time, that server was also loading 100 other \u201cpage loads\u201d for different sites to muscle their way into everyone\u2019s GA account.<\/p>\n When you consider how easy it is to buy another (twenty)<\/em> $5 host, you\u2019ll really grasp the how easy it is for this system to get way out of hand.<\/p>\n If the ROI is there, this problem gets far worse before it gets any better.<\/p>\n This issue first became known to the public a few years ago when a mysterious online service called Semalt (hate these jerks)<\/em> started to use the technique to appear on Analytics reports.<\/p>\n And, as always, social media reacted.<\/p>\n If you don\u2019t believe them, believe me. It was everywhere--It\u2019s still rampant.<\/p>\n But with a big problem comes an innovative solution, or so we thought.<\/p>\n As it turns out, these spammers are so active, and their technique is so good, that many techniques pitched as being a \u201csolution\u201d did not<\/b> work.<\/p>\n Hell, you\u2019ve probably tried a few of them yourself.<\/p>\n In preparation for this article, I went through my considerable amount of browser bookmarks and my Pocket archive to find all of the guides I had used before prioritizing this in-house fix for our team.<\/p>\n Techniques that do not actually solve this problem include:<\/p>\n The only one that really came close was the exclusion filter. The real problem there was that it was very difficult to find current and consistently-updated lists. Many of the founders\/creators of such lists just weren\u2019t actually invested in keeping a solution updated.<\/p>\n The constant maintenance required to keep a list like that up is prohibitive to it being an effective<\/b> solution to the problem, especially when there is no profit in doing so.<\/p>\n To be reasonable and effective, a solution to identify and weed out ghost and referral spam traffic would need to be:<\/p>\n Using those principles as guidelines, we crafted the process that works so well for us now.<\/p>\n Just in case you need a refresher:<\/p>\n First, I personally (and professionally)<\/em> always prefer to play with segments instead of adding a new filter since segments do not permanently alter your data.<\/p>\n If you mess up while playing with a filter and accidentally filter out real referrers, then that data is never coming back.<\/p>\n Segments also allow to build upon previously used data, and you can apply them retroactively<\/b> as well. No matter how long you\u2019ve left that bad data idling around in your account, you can get it all now with a well-constructed segment.<\/p>\n Thanks to the innovative team we\u2019ve got here at the Magistrate, (in particular, our Programmer Josh, who championed building this tool)<\/em>, we took advantage of a tool we use every day, anyways: Slack<\/p>\n The result? A custom integration into our Slack channel that posts every new campaign source from all of our client\u2019s sites every hour. When it arrives, we give it a quick look and either whitelist it or add it the exclusion segment.<\/p>\n It works like this:<\/p>\n We\u2019re super proud of this, and it lets us update our list at least<\/em> five times per day.<\/p>\n Despite our success\u2014our analytics data is pretty damn clean\u2014we\u2019ve learned along the way that our method and tool should still be supplemented with other techniques, to cover your bases more than anything.<\/p>\n In the end, there is so much spam that we\u2019re only just past the tip of the iceberg. Our data collection is relatively small and young.<\/p>\n Plus, thanks to some friends on inbound, we got some great pointers about solid techniques that also help suppress unwanted spam. The comments and exchange<\/a> that we had here are well worth a look at for additional context into solving Analytics Spam.<\/p>\n The rest of the steps are relatively easy.<\/p>\n Together, you\u2019d get a very clean analytics profile.<\/p>\n Like, \u201cyour house while the in-laws are over\u201d clean.<\/p>\n One contention we\u2019ve gotten during our time creating and promoting our tool, is that many have had success with the inclusive hostname filter, listed above. Though the technique is currently proving mostly effective<\/b>, we\u2019ve found that it\u2019s not the best long-term solution to keeping data clean:<\/p>\n We\u2019ve never quite seen hostname filters work 100% because of this vulnerability. We feel like our tool is finally the complete solution since it doesn\u2019t discriminate by what means the spam referrer ended up in our GA account, it just stops it dead in its tracks.<\/p>\n Editor\u2019s note:<\/strong> I asked Alex why the exclusion list was required in addition to the inclusive hostname filter (which I have personally implemented on my sites)<\/em>. His answer was as above - while the inclusive hostname filter is pretty effective, there are sites that slip through the net (and the spammers are getting smarter)<\/em>. When I checked my own analytics he was absolutely right as you can see below:<\/p>\n So as Alex says, a combination of both methods will be most effective in eliminating all ghost referrals and keeping your analytics clean.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At this point, an honest person would admit, setting up all of these solutions together is also a lot of work. I know about all the solutions, have documented them thoroughly and still don\u2019t implement them all on sites I control. A solution that never gets implemented is no solution at all.<\/p>\n And that is why we feel like this is finally a complete<\/b> solution.<\/p>\n Again, it\u2019s hard to stay 100% ahead of the curve.<\/p>\n But, if you need a robust and QUICK tool (done in a minute, literally)<\/em> that is well-maintained, we\u2019ve put an easy to use tool for you. It\u2019ll only cost an email address, and we\u2019re invested in keeping it updated.<\/p>\n![\"ghost](\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/image03.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\n
![\"referrer](\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/image07.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"snapshot](\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/image06.png\")
<\/p>\nEver Wonder How Easy It Is?<\/h2>\n
Coming Up Short: Tactics that Don\u2019t Take it All the Way<\/h2>\n
![\"image00\"](\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/image00.png\")
![\"image02\"](\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/image02.png\")
![\"image09\"](\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/image09.png\")
<\/p>\n\n
The Missing Puzzle Piece<\/h2>\n
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Step 1: Using Segments to Filter and Block Spam<\/h2>\n
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![\"using](\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/image01.png\")
<\/p>\nStep 2: Maintaining The Exclusion List<\/h2>\n
![\"process\"](\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/image08.png\")
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![\"image04\"](\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/image04.png\")
after clicking either Blacklist<\/i> or Whitelist<\/i> you\u2019re taken to\u2026<\/b><\/li>\nFacing Reality: There is No One Solution<\/h2>\n
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![\"ghost](\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/ghost-referral.jpg\")
<\/p>\nMoving Forward<\/h2>\n
![\"segment](\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/image05.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"adding](\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/image12.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"snapshot](\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/image10.png\")
<\/p>\n