I currently manage quite a few Google Analytics accounts for different websites and am trying to work out how to remove certain Anayltics spam from these accounts. I have previously added filters like excluding Russia visitors as the businesses are local UK based but I am now getting a lot of traffic from:
Language - not set
&
Page - sharebutton.to
If i was to exlucde the above would that get rid of any actual visitors as well as spam or will it get rid of 100% spam?
If someone could help with this that would be brilliant.
Many Thanks
Paul
Filters based on countries or the name of the spam are not efficient because both can be easily changed by the spammers.
Also, it isn't possible to filter the (not set) entries in Analytics, this label is added after the visit is recorded when Analytics doesn't find a value for that dimension.
Instead what you should use
One hostname filter, this will help prevent the majority of the spam, whether it shows as referral, page, language, etc. and independently of the name used by the spammer.
A source filter for the sneaky crawlers which are far less frequent.
Here you will find detailed instructions on how to create the hostname filter and other measures you can take to prevent fake traffic.
Related
We were checking newly implemented Google Analytics for our mobile app and surprisingly there are a lot of visitors from multiple countries but in actuality, we haven't released our app for any store and it's just beta between 5 main users.
After checking Google Analytics report in details we have found that it got spammed by Bot call "Trumps Bot" when something happens on your account you can see following lines in your language section.
“Secret.ɢoogle.com You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump!”
There are a lot of solution available to avoid this data in your reports using the filter but i was just wondering if there is any concrete solution on permanently remove this data from my reports and also is there anything we can do to avoid such data in future as its seriously affecting business strategy.
Due the tecnology used on Google Analytics the only way to eliminate this referal is using a filter, check one common point of all this hits . In this case is a hard one, because all the parameters changes , exept for the language, for a well know reason, to see the spam.
So try to use this one, in my case works
I highly recommend you read the community policy, this can be considered as off-topic question
Analytics spammers are always trying to find new ways of getting attention, and with this one, this spammer hit it big.
It is not possible to permanently remove it unless you delete the whole property. But you can create and advance segment to get a clean view.
But the most important part is blocking it so it doesn't pollutes your data. For this particular type of spam you should create a custom exclude language filter with this expression:
\s[^s]*\s|.{15,}|.|,
That expression will block any hit that doesn't use a proper language. That combined with a valid hostname filter should prevent most of the current spam and save you a lot of headaches.
If you need help, you can check this step by step guide for building these filters and creating the advanced segment to remove it from your historical data.
Here is also a related question.
Login in to Your Google Analytics account
Select ADMIN Section
Click on All Filters -- Add Filters
Give a filter name such as -- Include only website traffic
In Predefined section, select Include Only
for more... Click Here
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.
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
Trying to set up Google Analytics to track two language versions of the same site: example.com and example.com.mx. Right now, we have it setup under two different profiles, each with the standard (different numbers) tracking code. That method doesn't seem to track the sites correctly.
My question: is this the correct implementation for the example.com, example.com.mx scenario or does it need to be setup as suggested be Google in the link below?
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55503
Thanks in advance for any input...
It all depends on whether you have many visitors visiting both sites - if you use different webproperty IDs (UA-XXXXXXX-Y and UA-XXXXXXX-Z), a user visiting both will be counted as 2 unique visitors, 2 visits, so your unique Visitor count will be inflated.
That is because GA uses first party cookies only for identifying unique visitors, so the cookie is unique to the domain.
If you don't care about Unique Visitor duplication, you can use 2 different webproperty ids, and even just one and separate the sites with profile-level filters.
If you do want to see both sites as only one entity, you should use _setDomainName.
Have a look at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingSite.html for implementation advice.
Ad-Servers seem (and do) know a lot about the use who is visiting a certain webpage leveraging Behavioral and Contextual Targeting. I would love to be able to keep track of that data as well. In particular I would like to know:
age range
male/female
geographical info
I would like this information on a per request basis (not a daily summary)
What is the best way to accomplish this?
Thanks!
There are vendors who specialize in characterizing your Site's traffic. Very roughly they work by finding the closest match to your Site from among a large population of Sites in which they do in fact have detailed demographic data. To improve the matching, some of them give you a javascript snippet to insert into your Site's pages to collect user data and send it to their servers (more or less like web analytics code).
Quantcast is such vendor. The link i included will take you to their page that displays sample audience demographic reports.
Crowd Science is another.
Neither of these are free (though they might have a freemium service, i don't know.
Alexa, on the other hand, is free and offers similar data; just enter your Site's url in their textbox, then when you get the results page, select the Audience tab.
Age and Gender: Ask your users.
Geographical Info: Use GeoIP targeting.
You can try Hitwise, but it's a little on the pricey side IIRC
Doug's is a good answer, but Google Analytics now gives you this too, based on their acquisition of DoubleClick. So it's free.
Google Analytics Demographics & Interests
Note that no matter who you get this information from, the information is based on cross-site information. This is based on "third party cookies" which many users turn off (sometimes without knowing they are doing this) depending on their browser's security/privacy settings.
I have been asked to provide recommendations on "Verified Analytics" for the next iteration of my company's site. Verified to mean that when we sell ad space, it's based on a number of page-views, and the people who buy that space want a way to verify that the numbers we give them are the actual numbers we're delivering.
I have turned to The Google and the only services I can find for this sort of thing revolve around Google Analytics and the sale of a domain name. I export my analytics numbers to a PDF, have Google email the PDF to my auctioneer, and they look for signs of tampering. If no signs of tampering are found they put a little "Verified" badge on the domain auction. (Here)
Other than this, and something similar on another domain sales site, I haven't found anything like what I've been asked to find.
Currently we are using Google Analytics, however I've been also asked to recommend a replacement for that based on the ability to be verified. I'd rather just stick with Google Analytics since we also use Google for advertising.
Google analytics is a third party service, so you can't modify the stats data yourself anyway. If google is sending them the report directly there's not even scope for you to be editing the numbers so their concern is more paranoia than reasonable.
a) You can add another user in google analytics and give them report-only access. This way they can look at the stats themselves.
b) Add another hits tracking service such as http://www.hitslink.com/ and give the client access to these reports too.
Quantcast / Comscore / Compete all make estimates of site traffic based on limited amounts of data. As an ad buyer I would never take these stats as proof of anything really.
Online Audience Measurement is a term to search for - you're looking at providers like Quantcast, Comscore or Compete. These work alongside, rather than replace your current web analytics package.
Qauntcast actually measures traffic directly. You insert a tag, same as Google Analytics. Most ad agencies and advertisers accept Quantcast numbers for traffic validation.