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
Related
So the following which I'm writing is just to discuss whether something like this is even possible or if any of you would have any better ideas/suggestions or understanding how this might work. I thank anyone who takes time to read this in advance and I hope I don't explain myself too incoherently:
Let's say I have a page in WordPress which has a little bit of text and a video. Basicly I would like to share that page's link or I'd want to forward that page via e-mail to a certain group of people (let's say 10-50 specifically chosen people) and I want to track who of them opened the link and for how long they were on the page or watched the video.
I would like to make this happen in a way that I wouldn't have to make 50 different pages or 50 different URLs for each person (or 50 different tracking strings for that matter). Or that I wouldn't have to take a newsletter-mailer type page in between this process.
Basicly, I would like to make the sharing/forwarding and analytics overview process as easy as possible, so that an admin or moderator wouldn't have to check too many different pages to get the info.
I really appreciate any and all feedback.
[Also really sorry if I posted this in the wrong place. Please feel free to redirect me to a corresponding slot].
Technically, Google Analytics isn't meant to be used to track this specifically- it's typically meant to track groups of anonymized users. That being said, it is capable of doing this (but may not be as automated as you had hoped).
You are correct in thinking that you'd either need to duplicate the pages or create multiple different campaign URLs.
The other thing to keep in mind is that as emails are forwarded, there is no way to update the URL after the email has been sent, so if you email me and I forward it to someone else who clicks through, you're going to think someone else is me.
One way around this would be if you know your users IP addresses (not only is that a big "if", but it can also be spoofed), or some other uniquely identifying feature (any chance these people have signed-up through your website and have actual user IDs? That'd make things infinitely easier!).
Maybe you could customize the email to add their email address as a query string? That could still require a lot of work (and you couldn't just share a single link).
Now, you can not store personally identifiable info in GA (including IP and email addresses), but at the server-level you could assign a custom dimension with a uniquely generated ID and send that to GA. Now you've got all the info you need!
Unfortunately this method only works if you can detect some kind of "fingerprint" of your users.
Unfortunately what you described isn't quite what Google Analytics was designed to do. If you wanted to get into detailed user-specific tracking, I'd advise you look into a CRM. Those systems are designed specifically for user tracking as you described.
Hope that gets you pointed in the right direction.
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.
My blog is about 7 months old. At my current level I usually get around 100 sessions per day. I have always actively filtered out all ghost referrers as they appear and thus should have virtually none of them appearing in my Google Analytics data. I have also checked the box that instructs Analytics to ignore "known bots".
So I'm wondering after all these measures, how many of my sessions each day should I still reasonably chalk up to bot traffic?
And a side question, is there anything else I can do to make my Analytics data more accurate in detecting only real human traffic?
One thing you could do is add an invisible link to you main page anyone clicking on the link has a very high probability of being a bot.
I'm currently researching a solution to monitor the performance of specific sections of a page. For example, you have a simple page with 2 images with links to other pages. You are driving lots of traffic to this page and you are experimenting with different contents on that page.
6 months after, you want to see which section of the page performed better with what kind of specific imges.
Let's imagine you require a report that should tell you the following: on average, the first spot performs better, but last week the image was bad and that's why you had less conversion from that spot.
I'd like to use such a system on a high-traffic homepage of an eCommerce website, in order to better monitor the usage of the selling spots.
I was thinking to use Google Analytics events with a positioning scheme (splitting the website in columns and rows, giving to each cell an identification ID such as a1 for column a, row 1) and keeping a local datawarehouse of creatives (images, promotions etc.), but apparently, after 10.000.000 hits per month, Analytics is recommending the premium version which is quite pricey (12k USD per month, 1 year upfront payment).
I was thinking about PIWIK as an alternative, but there is no event tracking there - or am I missing anything?
Looking forward to hearing your input on this matter.
You're better off with a provider like Optimizely for this use case. Still gonna be expensive, but it'll more quickly get you the information you need to make decisions.
We normally use multi variation tests or A/B tests to measure the success of user interfaces. Google Analytics have this feature and it is free.
This links maybe useful
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDWTMOC_Dp4
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1745147?hl=en
We have some third parties that are sending us traffic and have asked us to put a tracking pixel on the confirmation page so they can track through the sales.
We are currently using Google analytics for our own usage.
Google will remember the original referral through cookies. This may be a good or bad thing. If someone purchases through company B's link but they had originally found our site through company A - then company A still gets the 'referal'. That doesn't seem fair, but it seems to be the way google analytics works:
For example, if this is the user's
first visit to your site, the tracking
code will add the campaign tracking
information to the cookie. If the user
previously found and visited your
site, the tracking code increments the
session counter in the cookie.
Regardless of how many sessions or how
much time has passed, Google Analytics
"remembers" the original referral.
This gives Analytics true
multi-session tracking capability.
Currently we only have one tracking pixel on our 'receipt page' from a company that we're not even doing business with. Having a second company ask me for us to add one makes me thing 'wait a minute - we're going to suddenly be inundated with these things!'. Plus it means someone can look at the source and see all the people we do business with.
This isn't Oprah - you cant ALL have tracking pixels. Right ?
How should we manage sales from multiple traffic sources in the most honest way for both sides - especially if they already have a system set up that they insist on using?
Here's how I solved the problem at our company: we gave our partners a URL that has a parameter in the query string. This parameter triggers a cookie. On the "goal"/confirmation page (where the tracking pixel is usually inserted), we insert some logic to see if the cookie value is correlated with a one of our recognized partners (chained if-else or switch statement). If a match is found, then the tracking pixel is displayed.
Even though you asked this question a while ago, I hope that this still helps you or someone else with the same problem!