So I've been working on a website for a while. GA account has been up for a couple months but I waited for the website to be finished before putting up the actual JS tag.
In the meantime, the website is being HTTP password restricted (basic authentication) so it isn't even accessible unless you know the user/pwd combination.
To my surprise, I realized today that GA has logged several hundred views to the root of my website. Paths are mostly things like:
/
/?from=http://social-widget.xyz/
/?from=http://www.traffic2cash.xyz/
Bounce% and exit% both at 100% for all of them.
I realize this looks like referral spam, and there are ways to prevent it. Came across this upon googling:
http://botcrawl.com/block-social-widget-xyz-referral-spam-in-google-analytics/
My question is: how can GA log anything anyway when no tag is up and the website isn't even accessible?
Thank you very much in advance
Because it's spam. They hit Google Analytics directly with random GA codes and don't even go through your website.
GA can't tell if these are real hits (from website visits) or fake hits (from spam bots who hit GA directly calling the same ode as they would if on the website). Though arguably they should do more about this.
Massively annoying - particularly when first starting out as this can be a heavy proportion of your "traffic".
It's easy to set up a filter rule is to catch a lot of this by filtering on hostname. As they are randomly hitting GA and don't even know what website they are hitting GA for, they don't usually set this correctly. Real traffic should only come from yourwebsitedomain.com so add a filter for that.
STRONG piece of advice: abandon the default UA-########-1 tracking code of your new website -- simply do not use it!
Create a second and third property on the Admin screen, then use the tracking code for the third property. You will immediately see a lot less spam. No filters or segments necessary!
If you want the whole sad story about spam visits in GA, I have been maintaining the Definitive Guide article for over a year now:
http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-to-removing-google-analytics-spam/
Related
I have a website that sells products and I'm using google analytics to know some statistics about the website. Sometimes, errors happens for various reasons and purchases doesn't go through. You then have to refresh the page and try again, then everything works. The website displays the message telling the user to refresh and try again. I'm curious how many people actually do that. My question is, is it possible to know what users do when this error happens? Do they refresh and try again? Do they close the tab or do they do something else?
The question is quite broad at this moment, but there are a couple of improvements to your measurement setup, that can help you to investigate this customer behavior.
What I would do, is to implement an event tracking to indicate, that this error has occurred. You can find details about event tracking in this guide. Although I suppose, that your users are not likely to enter the website at this page, it might be a good practice to set the non-interaction flag of the event, as it is not actually generated by a user interaction.
I'd also create tracking for page reload, either by creating an other event for this, or by adding -reload suffix to these repeated pageview URLs. You can find good resources for this on SO as well, e.g. this one.
If you have a special URL for this error page (e.g. purchase-error.html instead of purchase-success.html), it is also easy to track the exit rate specific to this page.
Besides of Google Analytics, you might also want to set up heatmap or screen recording tools to understand this behavior. Hotjar, Lucky Orange are a few examples. (No affiliation.)
I've previously used statcounter, which does a great job. I'm looking to start tracking with google analytics as well, but it seems to be way off.
I tried to figure out the cause of the discrepancy and it looks like google is counting each page view times 5,10 or sometimes even more. For example, this is a site I barely use. I accessed it at 11:00 today. Instead of showing just 1 hit from me, its showing 10 users as having gone to the site
http://screencast.com/t/GT29OKzG
Similar things are happening with my other sites as well.
Do I have some weird setting turned on?
The unusual spike on direct traffic is most likely caused by spam, lately spam like free-share-buttons and similars, have been hitting with fake direct visits along with the referral.
The usual way to stop the spam by adding a filter for the referral won't work on this case since the fake direct visits will still go through.
To stop the fake direct traffic and any form of ghost spam, referral, keyword, page... you can use a filter that includes only your valid hostnames. You can find more information about this solution here
https://stackoverflow.com/a/28354319/3197362
And more details on the fake direct traffic issue here:
http://www.ohow.co/unusual-increase-in-direct-traffic-on-ga-spam/
Hope it helps,
I recently signed up for a google analytics account in anticipation of a new site I'm putting together. The site has not been published, and the tracking script has not been put in the code yet.
Somehow after logging back in to grab the tracking code, it's showing I've already had 275 views in the past month. How is this possible???
These are very likely ghost referrals sent by spammers targeting random GA property IDs (which explains why you see them even before your Web site is live). Since you are setting up a new site, probably the easiest way to get rid of them is to create a new Web property so that you get an ID not ending with -1. The reason is that this type of spam is only targeted at the first property in an account.
If you want to get more information about how referrer spam works and alternative solutions to eliminate it, here is an article I wrote some time ago:
http://veithen.github.io/2015/01/21/referrer-spam.html
I'm not a really advanced Analytics user, so I've been trying to Google this, but haven't come up with a great answer. My analytics says 95% of my site visits to my blog today have come from site38.social-buttons.com and yesterday it was another subdomain of the same site. I visited social-buttons.com, but am unfamiliar with it, and have never deliberately put that code into my Wordpress site. I do have some plug-ins installed, which are "Subscribe / Connect / Follow Widget", which displays my social media links, and also "Really simple Facebook Twitter share buttons", which puts the like links on my posts.
My questions are, how are people finding my site through social-buttons.com? And are these quality hits?
Thanks, I appreciate any info!
This kind of visits are called Ghost Referrer Spam since they never reach your site. They use a GA weakness to make a fake visit and get a record in your data.
They do it to get traffic, people get curious to see who is visiting them and click on the link.
This specific Referrer Spam is nasty because it make multiple visits at the same time, is related to the number of the subdomain so if it says site38... it hits with 38 visits, I've also have many of these, here is a screenshot I took:
In my case is a different simple-share-buttons.com but is the same thing.
The easiest way to stop it is by making a filter for each spammer in your GA. Check this article to find more detailed information http://www.ohow.co/block-social-buttons-simple-share-buttons-referral/
As an alternative, you can make a more general filter to take care once and for all of all the Spammers by making a list of Valid Hostnames, this is more advanced and you have to be more careful. You can find more information about this solution here https://stackoverflow.com/a/28354319/3197362
It's actually referral spam. Take a look at this https://www.mooresoftwareservices.com/Web-Commerce/social-buttons-com-referrer-spam
So unfortunately they are not good quality hits.
I have been requested to get involved with a family member's site.
To date, they have been paying an SEO outfit, which I believe has been feeding them lies and milking them for money.
I can see that all pages in the site have Google Analytics. However, the SEO outfit refuses to let us see the Analytics page, and has always just forwarded them some (presumably doctored) slideshows.
The only tracking service that lists their site is Compete, which shows a number of visitors far from what they are paying for.
I would like to add their site to my own Analytics account. I have ftp access to their server, and permission from the site owners to modify any files I want.
However, I don't want to do anything that might destroy the entire existing history of analytics data, or even that would interfere with the current SEO outfit [until I have something concrete in-hand].
Does anyone know:
Can I add Analytics to my own account when it was originally setup by someone else?
Will there be any negative results of attempting this?
Any other ideas?
Thanks
Edit: Can anyone suggest a better title - I can tell mine is not good?
I've put two Google Analytics tracking codes from different accounts on the same site without issues. It may cause the site to be a tiny bit slower (as it communicates twice with Google) but it'll do nothing that would delete old data or impede collection of new data.
In short, what you're doing sounds like a good first step.
You will not, however, be able to access past data by doing this. You will be able to compare their numbers with the numbers you're getting, though, which should be valuable.
I don't know if you can add the same domain to two different Google Analytics accounts (easy enough to try, though), but you can always add another service's Javascript snippet, e.g. Woopra. Google and Woopra produced very similiar results in my experiments.
You may want to leave their Google Analytics tracking in place while adding your own Google Analytics tracking. In that case, your numbers should be identical to whatever is being tracked by this third party.
You'll need to set up your own account and then add in the creation of your pagetracker object and your own track page view. You don't need to recreate the entire page code. You can do it with two more lines. It would look something like:
var pageTracker =
_gat.getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1"); //EXISTING pageTracker._trackPageView();
var secondTracker =
_gat.getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1"); //YOUR TRACKING ACCOUNT secondTracker._trackPageView();