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
Related
I have a question about filtering / segments in Google Analytics for a unique scenario with one of my clients. I essentially want to block a page URL forever out of analytics --- never see it counted page views, top pages, etc. What is the best way to do that?
Developers added a widget to my client's website which uses an iframe URL from their domain. This iframe is on 30+ different URLs which makes this URL seem like it is the #1 top page which is severely skewing their analytics. I am told there is no other way to do it - especially with the budget/scope of work - which means I need to find the best way to filter this out of Google Analytics reporting.
For instance, I am looking at "Behavior - Overview" - this iframe URL is #1. I know I can click into "view full report" and from there hit advanced and exclude this page to get the real results.
However, is there a top-level filter that can be permanently activated to block this page so you do not have to do the advanced filtering every time you are in Google Analytics?
Thank you for your help!
Just to confirm, your issue is this:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1012049?hl=en
"Inflated number of pageviews"
If you just want to block it, would this not work?
In GA, go to Admin -> Filters -> Create new filter -> Custom -> Exclude by Request URL -> use the URI that you refer to.
I'd be interested to know if that works!
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.
We made a google analytics account for one of our clients as part of the requirements.
Under Reporting tab, we have sections like Behavior -> Site Content -> All pages. In All Pages section we are able to see a table which contains all the urls which are viewed with respective pageviews , unique pageviews and other dimensions.
A normal page view looks like:"/pwsportal/faces/homePageNav/mktplan_adf.Ctrl_9_afrLoop_1234423".
Some how there are some weird page urls like :
I tried using Exclude Filters and couldn't eliminate these kind of urls.
From one on the blog i got to know that if any url contains any script tags it is a part of hacking technique called cross site scripting.
Finally i am here to find a solution to eliminate the these kind of existing urls and to prevent them from getting registered in future into google analytics.
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.
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.