I'm testing out a plugin on a Wordpress site to prevent referral traffic. The default setting is a redirect to google.com. I can override this and display a 403 error instead.
Do you see any advantage with one over the other?
From what I have read when researching how to deal with this issue, most of the referral 'spam' you are getting in google analytics doesn't actually come from hits to your site, but instead it is done by spammers exploiting google's analytics code, by using random tracking IDs, and they up end up using your ID too.
Having said that, I don't think a wordpress plugin can do anything to prevent that kind of spam as they don't ever reach your site, and I believe the vast majority of referral/analytics spam being done currently is using the method mentioned above.
So the best way to get rid (or at least largely reduce the amount) of referral spam you're getting is to set filters within your google analytics dashboard. Even the methods for that are constantly changing, as google keeps improving that service, but here's two fairly recent articles that may help you configure those:
https://www.distilled.net/resources/quick-fix-for-referral-spam-in-google-analytics/
http://www.shivarweb.com/4635/filter-analytics-spam/
Related
we have recently implemented social login to our website. We are running ads to that website and after implementing the social login we lost all conversion data - everything is accounted to facebook.
Also we have kind of "sub-website" shop-domain.com where are some products that are sold separately and user can migrate between domain.com and shop-domain.com and vice versa. Can this loose conversions as well?
My question is:
how can we configure analytics / ads / website to correctly count the conversions?
What have I done:
In google analytics documentation I found something called linker to fix user migration between domains and page referrer after login. But it doesnt seem to help
gtag('config', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1', {
'linker': {
'domains': ['domain.com', 'domain.eu', 'shop-domain.com', 'shop-domain.eu']
},
'page_referrer':'domain.com'
});
Thanks for any suggestions
Honestly, this issue is a bit complicated to solve over a forum discussion like this. You will probably need to hire an expert to audit your setup and look for the cause of the problem.
But let me try giving you some hints and point you in the right direction so that you can debug on your own if you like.
If the Facebook login is the only addition to the code recently and you started seeing conversions credited to it since setting it up, then the probable culprit is that FB login. In that case, one of the possible solutions is to exclude it from referrers in GA, but that might or might not resolve the issue, and it might require bypassing it in some other ways (through GA filters for example).
If the actual problem appeared even before the FB login and the traffic sources for the conversions were not accurate (but back then, some other traffic source was taking the most significant chunk of the conversion sources, and you didn't see it as suspicious), then the something might be happening with the GA setup. In most of the cases, in GA subdomains shouldn't need any Linker parameters for the traffic sources to be credited properly, and you most probably should remove the Linker between them completely. Check if both domain and the subdomain have the cookieDomain set to "auto" and it should be fine.
I started to notice that my Google Ads clicks wasnt 100% counting by google analytics (For exemple, during a certain period I had 300 clicks and only 100 sessions were counted as Paid Search on analytics). So I contacted Google Ads Support, they investigated and came to me with this:
Actually, your site is losing the attribution of Google Ads because of an automatic redirection of the structure in which it was developed.
When we have Google Ads linked with Google Analytics, they are talked through a parameter called GCLID. To verify this loss, follow the path I made (in several products, here is an example):
1- I accessed the link https://mywebsite.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194
2- After full site loading, I added the & gclid = Tester123 parameter to the URL (in the browser, so the final URL was https://mywebsite.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194&gclid=Tester123) and hit Enter
3- To understand if there is a redirect, the normal behavior would be for the URL to remain the same (with & gclid = Tester123 at the end), but in this case, the parameter some (and hence the assignment)
So, the campaign actually appeared (not set) in Analytics, and could be assigned to any of the other channels (Direct, Organic, ...) For this to be resolved, the site structure must stop causing this automatic redirection in the final URL of each product. With this, the results will be effectively assigned to Google Ads.
They also said that if even if I want to use manual tracking (UTMs) I would still have that problem, since the redirections would keep spoiling it.
As I use Shopify as my website platform, I checked with them and I have no redirections that are causing this problem, at least not created by me nor that their support know.
So I am lost over all this. I dont know where to start solving this problem. Google doesnt tell me what kind of redirections may cause this, I dont use any kind of redirections, and Shopify cant tell me if their code causes this problem (what I dont believe, because other shopify websites would also been suffering from this).
So can anyone give me any direction about this? What redirections may be causing this lost of data?
Thanks for your time!
One thing to note, Google Ads might have a different way of counting, there is the possibility of multiple clicks per session.
That said, you can try Google Tag Assistant, start your recording, click on one of your ads, follow that through and see the parameters being passed.
Unfortunately, it is hard to debug with limited information. The more details you can provide the better.
Check where your GA code is placed in the page code. If GA script is at the bottom of page or there are some heavy scripts above GA tracker, losses of bounced sessions can be large. I.e. user enters the page and immediately closes it. GA script doesn't have time to download.
Why user closes the page immediately?
Сlick by mistake
Slow site
And check that all your landing pages are OK and have 200 server response.
Recently I've been experiencing a large amount of (what I think is) ghost traffic.
I need help in creating a filter to exclude this traffic from my Google Analytics.
URL's are showing up that have other websites appended to them.
Almost all articles I've read mention including only relevant hostnames but this doesn't seem to apply to my situation.
Here you can see the URL's with other random website addresses.(overworlf.com/evite.com/shmoop.com and many others)
Here is a screenshot of the hostnames none of them are out of the ordinary. I suspect this ghost traffic is using my main domain looking at the huge amount of users.
Posted the same question at stackexchange, someone there was able to help me
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/118666/94264
"Almost all the analytics spammers insert data into your stats by pinging the GA tracker directly with fake data. They never visit your site and they usually just guess at the tracking id without knowing website host name associated with it. They won't send a host name, so it wouldn't appear in that report. See How to fight off Google Analytics referrer spammers?
That appears not be the case here. In this case these appear to be actual hits to your website. I tried one of those "top active pages" and it gives a 404 error. It looks like your 404 template has the GA tricking snippet installed on it. I don't think that is best practice. You could try taking the snippet off your 404 page. Then if you did get actual hits to such URLs, GA wouldn't count them as pages."
This can happen when there are search and replace or advanced filters. Are there filters on your view that alter the Request URI?
EDITED AFTER IT WAS CONFIRMED THAT THERE WERE NO FILTERS:
Typically, tracking 404 pages is best practice (referring to your other post).
I don't believe that removing the tracking from that page will help anyway. Like the other poster mentioned, these hits are sent from bots most of the time and they never actually land on your site. The hit is sent directly to your property with an http call. It bypasses the site completely, so whether there is a 404 page or not, the hit will show up in GA.
Adding an exclusion filter to exclude traffic with a page path (not hostname) ending in ".com"
I have a web app that I deployed in AppHarbor with Google Analytics. Development is still ongoing and I test it very often live to checkout for example stuffs I did with the CSS, etc.
Everything is working fine but I'd like to know how many times I am accessing the website apart from the rest of the visitors who visits it. When checking the reports in Google Analytics it only shows me the ISPs of the visitors. I'll need something more drilled down like an IP address, but this seems to go against Google Analytic's policy and I do not know if this is even possible still.
Like right now I have 72 visits. But I have been testing so a lot of those could just be me. Would be good to know the actual visitor count.
I know this is probably a little late but you can set a filter to ingore your own traffic from reports. Here is how you do it.
In addition for adding a deprecated variable and using filters, you can build the code so that it only prints the tracking code if e.g. an identifier cookie is not found. Other common option is a URL parameter.
You can then set this cookie for your browser and be excluded from traffic.
When you sign up to google analytics it instructs you to use a javascript snippet on every page you want to track. This code includes an API key, which is visible to everyone who views your source code.
How does it guarantees that the request is coming from the real site, and not from a third-party who wants to mess with your statistics? Does it check the HTTP Referer header? Even that is not safe, as it can be forged.
GA doesn't (to the best of my knowledge) attempt to verify that the site ID (the UA-XXXXX-XX code) matches a domain specified in the GA setup - I think this is a good thing, as you can track a bunch of related sites as though they were a single site (think single-product minisites, for example). However, this does leave the GA profile open to accidental or malicious use of the UA code on other unrelated sites.
The easiest way to fix this is to add a filter onto the GA profile which restricts reported data to a specified referrer hostname set. This will clean out the accidental typo problem, but malicious types would be able to work around this if they were really interested (but they'd be more likely to grief your PPC campaigns instead).