Simple Ways To Remove Google Analytics Referral Spam

Looking for simple ways to remove Google Analytics Referral Spam!!! If yes, you are here at the right place. We would help you to minimize or remove referral spams completely. Before that, let us look at how to identify referrer spam in GA, Google Analytics:

Steps To Identify Referrer Spam In GA:

1. Go to Google Analytics View and find ‘Referrals’ report.
2. If you want to increase the timings, you can change the referrals report to two months.
3. Now set report bounce rate in decreasing order.
4. Referrals with 100% or 0% bounce rate that has 10 or more number of sessions are the spam referrers.
5. If this method is not working out, you can check the website page and see for yourself if the web pages are legitimate or not.
6. But before taking step no.5 make sure you have installed anti-virus, malware protection software’s on your website. Such viruses affect your system performance so do check them before visiting new sites.
7. To be on safer side, you can use Chrome browser as it detects malware faster than any other browser. So, make sure whenever you check any website that you found listed under referral spam of GA list, use chrome only.
8. Keep making notes of sites that are listed under referral spam of GA list.

Now coming down to blocking referral spams. Here we go…

When you know about referral spam in the GA list, you would start hunting for ways to remove them so that such spam referrals don’t visit your site again and again. You can check server log to get detailed information about the bot visit. Server log records bot visits through a file called .htaccess file or any other equivalent file. Here are the methods that you can use to remove referral spams:

Methods To Remove Referrer Spam In GA:

1. You can block the referrer that spambot uses.
2. You can Block the IP address that spambot uses.
3. You can block the entire range of IP address that spam bot users use.
4. You can prevent the user agents that spambots users use.
5. Using customized filters option to Block the spam referrer. This option is used in the case of server denying access to you.
6. You can use “Bot Filtering” feature used by Google Analytics.
7. The last but not the least, involves few steps:
   • Create Unfiltered View and new Property in Google Analytics.
   • Create a Hostname filter and add spam crawl filters
   • Create a Customized Segment and Turn on Bots & Spiders option by Google to remove referral spam.

Final Words:

Referral spams are mainly developed to attack vulnerable areas. So, if you have compromised with your web hosting service provider and used some cheap web hosting tools on your website, then there are higher chances of your site getting attacked by the referral spams. It is often seen that customized content management systems and shopping sites are designed to sell or buy products and services, but less emphasis is given on the vulnerabilities. So, it is better to start with hiring quality CMS service provider and a shopping cart service provider so that there are lesser threats and referral spams that attack your website unnecessarily.