I am using google analytics and suddenly I started getting high pageviews. I checked the access logs and found no actual requests. Then i confirmed it by removing the analytics script from the site but still i am seeing those pageviews in real time.
The source of traffic is from referral from monetzationking.com.
What has gone wrong and how can i filter that.
You can filter it out by creating a filter from the admin panel.
1 Go to the Admin tab.
2 Under the "View column", select Filters and click on + Add Filter Add filter button Google Anlaytics
3 Enter a name.
4 Filter Type: Custom and Exclude
5 Filter Field: select Campaign Source and put in the URL
This blog is a really comprehensive guide to filtering spam.
Related
In the past, with older Google Analytics accounts and properties I was able to use a Custom Report on a View to show a table of Full Referral URLs.
But with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) I can no longer have Views, so I'm at a loss how I can show Full Referral URLs? I can show the Referral Source (domain name only) but I'd prefer to see the full Referral Path.
Any ideas how I can go about this?
Thank you.
Closest I can find is to use the Explore tab to create a new Exploration with the following settings:
Variables
Dimensions: Page referrer
Metrics: Active users
Tab Settings
rows: Page referrer
show rows: 500 (optional)
values: Active users
cell type: Heat map (optional)
filters: (exclude any URL patterns here)
Then minimize the Variables and Settings panels.
This will give you a long table of full referrer URLs along with the number of users that came from there. In my case most are domain names, but a handful are full URLs pointing to a page.
It remains to be seen if this can be done more easily or more comprehensively.
Basically, I work for a theater and we send patrons to our primary website (we'll call this theater.org) to look at events and choose what tickets to buy and when they go to purchase tickets, we have put links in our primary webpages to our ticketing platform (we'll call this tickets.com).
Now, I have set up cross-domain tracking so that I can see people once they get onto tickets.com and see if they purchase a ticket. Great! But I can't really see where those people are specifically coming from because the referral source is always theater.org. I would like to see the original referral to theater.org that led to the purchase on tickets.com.
Here's what I've tried:
I've added the allowLinker (true) and the cookieDomain (auto) to my cross-domain Google TagManager
I have added both domains to the Referral Inclusion List (now I just get "direct" as the source for my eCommerce transactions instead of theater.org )
Additional info:
I have used the Analytics debugger console to see that the user-id changes as I move from one of my domains to the other, so that's definitely the primary issue
I see correct referrals on my Page Views for the theater.org , but not tickets.com
You need to make sure both tickets.com and theater.org both use the same Google Analytics property ID (UA-XXXXXXX-X) and have cross-domain tracking configured in the GTM container for BOTH domains.
Then you can look at the acquisition report tp get a sense of how people are arriving at your site OR dimensions like "previous page" or segment your goals by sessions that have visited a specific page.
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.
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).