Stats have been showing many referrals of spam crawlers. I have solved the problem doing a segment in Reports and in my Google analytics panel now the stats are “clean” without any disturbing data….
I want to know if there is something I can do to show this clean data also in my web app because now the data is full of rubbish referrals.
How I can filter them. are there any APIs which send me filtered data in queries ?
You can block the spam referrals by adding a filter.
In GA, got to the Admin tab. Then go to Filters (under the View column). Name the filter, select "Custom" and "Exclude". In the Filter Field dropdown, select "Campaign Source" and enter the domain of the spam referrer in the Filter Pattern box.
Click verify and it should show that referrals that were previously tracked will now be counted as 0 hits.
You can add multiple domains to the filter pattern using regex, like:
(domainone|domaintwo|domainthree)
Unfortunately, this will not retroactively change your past data.
Related
I have multiple domains (like domainA.com, domainB.com, etc.). They are unrelated to each other. Each domain has its own tracking number.
I have created a single GA account named "tws".
Under "tws->Properties and Apps", I see these different domains.
When I now click a domain in the list "Properties and Apps", the right side "Data View" shows "All Website Data".
When I click "All Website Data", it doesn't show me the data of this website.
I can tell because no matter which domain I click, the data always stays the same.
Even when I click a domain which shouldn't have any visitors, it shows me the visitors of some other domain.
Does anybody see which mistake I made?
Thank you.
Here is an excerpt of GTM:
Now that I made the suggested changes in GTM, Chrome's tag analyzer shows this:
I looked at one of your domain (seen in the previous image).
And as you can see in the images below, you're sending hit analytics to all your properties... so I suggest you to review the configuration of your GTM and send hits to the right domain.
Solutions:
PREFERRED: use a lookup table to send hits to correct Property based domain.
Or:
use a separate GTM for each domain.
Or:
use separate Analytics tag in the same GTM for each domain (not preferred but working).
I have an extremely weird filter issue with Google Analytics and Shopify. It used to control spam referral issues and control page views for just the store.
A view is setup that includes only the store's subdomain and its checkout based on the hostname filter field. I have tried these filter patterns:
store\.domain\.com|.*shopify\.com
store\.domain\.com|checkout\.shopify\.com
^(store\.domain\.com|checkout\.shopify\.com)$
The only pages included have a hostname of store.domain.com. No pages on shopify.com ever get included. It's only when the filter is removed altogether that page views on the shopify.com start appearing.
Here's where it gets weirder.
I have an unfiltered view setup where I run the exact filter patterns on the hostname as an advanced segment. Pages on the sub-domain checkout.shopify.com show for any of the filter patterns.
Secondly, I confirm the pages disappearing in the analytics reports have a hostname that is exactly:
checkout.shopify.com
Any further debugging ideas? Possible explanations?
The reason why your filter isn't working is because the Checkout at Shopify uses virtual pageviews instead of the regular ones, in order to have neat names that make your reports and funnels clean instead of leaving a bunch of meaningless IDs like the ones you see in the URL. These pageviews don't contain a hostname.
Now you may be wondering why it worked in your advanced segments. If you check your Hostname report (under Audience > Technology > Network) you'll see the checkout.shopify.com hostname there, but with 0 sessions and some transactions. That's because it was the ecommerce tracking code that sent the hostname value that you saw in your segment, not the pageview.
One solution in this case is to create your filter in two steps.
1) Merge the Hostname and Request URI into Custom Field 1 with an Advanced filter. If Hostname is your Field A, make sure you leave "Field A Required" unchecked.
2) Filter the custom field for store.domain.com|/checkout
On a side note, my preferred method to avoid spam in to simply create a new property. You'd be surprised how most spammers only target UA-XXXXX-1 and leave alone all others properties. They are probably just using the Measurement Protocol to send fake data and they generate the IDs programatically instead of actually going through the trouble of finding the code on the site.
I hope that helps, and don't hesitate to contact me or Shopify's support if you need any extra help.
I don't understand this. How can this happen?
I have an educational site and when I looked at Google Analytics I saw a porn page in active page which doesn't exist on my site.
What is this and how can I stop this from happening?
I checked for that page on my website and there is no such page.
This is not actually a hit for a Page on your website, it is rather a Referral (i.e. the source from which a user was supposedly coming from before landing on your site): https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2795830?hl=en
It is actually spam generated by bots and crawlers, and you can follow the steps listed in this article to mitigate this issue: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data
For the most common sources of Referral Spam, you might want to add an Exclude Filter to simply ignore those hits:
To filter out a referring source from your reports, create the following filter:
Filter Type: Custom Filter > Exclude
Filter Field: Campaign Source
Filter Pattern: Enter the domain of the referring source that you would like to exclude, for example, google.com. You can use regular expressions if you would like to exclude several referring sources.
If you are wondering about the "Active Page" view listing a spammy-looking URL, it is because that page most likely is a 404 page your website serves in response to the request.
Note that the URL also begins with a slash delimiter ("/"), as in yourwebsite.com/www.spammy-site.com -- this will show up in Analytics as /www.spammy-site.com, as in the examples above.
This is Ghost Referrer Spam, and it shows as both pages and/or referrals(you can see it in the screenshot bellow). This "visits" never reach your website actually. The only thing you should worry about is your data since it affects your statistics by adding useless data to your Google Analytics.
The only way to stop them for now is by filtering them in Google Analytics as #Philippe mention you can add a single filter or you can use a more general approach with a filter based on Valid Hostnames that will stop this and most of the Referrer Spam.
Basically, this works by excluding all hits that don't have any of your valid hostnames since the spammers don't know who are they targeting they use a fake or empty hostname as you can see in the screenshots
Here is more information about this solution and others https://stackoverflow.com/a/28354319/3197362
1 In Google Analytics, go to the Admin tab.
2 Go to View Column and select Filters.
3 Click on New Filter.
4 Put Spam Porn Referrals as a name for the Filter.
5 Filter Type select Custom. Filter Field, find and select Campaign
Source. In the Filter Pattern text box, copy and paste this Regular
Expression.
depositfiles-porn.ga|youporn-forum.ga|pornhub-forum.ga|generalporn.org|rapidgator-porn.ga|meendo-free-traffic.ga|amanda-porn.ga|torture.ml|pornhub-forum.uni.me
6 Click Save.
You can check this link also. I have seen the same problem and now i am done with this.
Stop Spam or adult site referrals in google analytics
Lets say I have 100 customers that bought a website from me. In the footer of their websites I have the text "Website developed by:" followed by a link that points to my company website. In Google Analytics for my company website these referrals will show up with the customers URL as source, and "referral" as medium. I would like all of the referrals from my 100 customer websites to be grouped, so that i can view the total metrics together. I have tried using utm_source="Customer Website" on the referral links, but the utm_source overwrites the default source (that is the customer website URL) so that there is no way for me to separate the different websites.
How can I set up this in Google Analytics so that I can both view all of the referrals from customer websites together and separately?
You can use utm_campaign=Customer-Referral and then see all this data under one campaign on Google Analytics.
You can direct the traffic to the destination page but with a dummy query string parameter such as www.example.com?ref=client, and then see the traffic that is directed to this specific page on Google Analytics.
Based on the ref, you can inject a user-level custom dimension that will show you data of that specific group. What you should add is ga('set', 'dimension1', 'Client Referral');
Add it to your tracking code before ga('send', 'pageview'); You need to send this data only once, at the first page view. You can read more about it here: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/platform/customdimsmets
(note: I used dimension1 assuming that you don't have existing custom dimensions. If you already using slot no. 1, update it to another slot).
We've accidentally placed the same Google Analytics tracking code on two different domains.
www.y.com
www.x.com
We've rectified the issue now but retrospectively, is there any way to filter that data going to the specific domain name www.x.com for example?
Note: this is not a duplicate of Google Analytics: Track two domains as one
You could add a filter to the view (profile) in question. That will remove the data that you don't want. Another option if you don't want to loose the data in the view would be to create a custom segment that you could use when ever you want to split the data out.
Update from Google+
You can search with regex
^/app/
in the small search bar (custom segment) in your page reports (e.g. Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages), after which you can look at the aggregate metrics for all pages which start with /app/ (i.e. all the pages with different parameters).
If all the /app/.* have the same page title, you can look at the Behavior > Overview report, but choose Page Title as the dimension.