I am trying to do some analysis in Google Analytics and discovered that there is a particular bot that is sending a ton of 'fake' traffic to my site. I'd like to exclude this traffic from the analysis. It comes from a certain source (the same one every time) and is always on 1 of 4 Service Providers. I have isolated the traffic with the following segment:
INCLUDE "Service Provider" Matches RegExp "W|X|Y|Z"
AND
INCLUDE "Source" Matches RegExp "nameOfSource.com"
^^That returns the exact traffic I would like to exclude. So one would assume that when I set the INCLUDEs to EXCLUDEs it would give me what I need (everything except that segment). Instead, it excludes all traffic from nameOfSource.com.
Does anyone have an idea of how I could successfully exclude that traffic, without removing the legitimate traffic from nameOfSource.com as well?
Thanks in Advanced!
Google Analytics has filters for this purpose.
First of all create another profile so you have 2 profiles an unfiltered profile with all your data and create a a second profile and on that profile add the filters you want.
You can find this under the admin section in your GA account.
AND statements in Advanced Segment are not cumulative but they are not cumulative but they run one after the other.
You can do it with Advanced filter.
on field A extract "nameOfSource.com" from source
on field B extract "W|X|Y|Z" from ISP
output A+B to a custom var
Then you can use a second filter to exclude trafic with this custom var, or use an Advanced segment on it.
Related
I have traffic coming from Salesloft emails sent by sales reps that gets bounced off a subdomain and then has a sbrc parameter appended to the URL. I'd like to ensure that this traffic gets counted by Google Analytics as coming from Email, whereas it's currently falling under the "Direct" bucket. Ideally, users would also be appending utm parameters to their links, but this isn't happening consistently.
I tried creating a filter to search and replace the following regex (?:^|\?|&)(sbrc=[^&]*&?) with ?utm_medium=email&utm_source=salesloft in the Request URI. This changed the displayed URL when looking at my realtime traffic, but did not change how GA categorized the channel of the traffic (still direct).
I then tried editing the default channel groupings for Email to be the system categorized OR Landing Page URL contains "sbrc" and dragged Email to the first channel grouping at the top. This doesn't seem to have done anything at all.
How can I make GA recognize this custom parameter as being attributable to the Email channel?
You could use advanced filters to solve this task. The Advanced filter lets you construct Fields for reporting from one or two existing Fields.
In your case, advanced filters let you assign values to campaign source and campaign medium, based on the content of the request URL. This is a sample setup for the source field, and you need a second similar filter for medium as well:
Ideally, users would also be appending utm parameters to their links,
but this isn't happening consistently.
If they add their own and use a utm_medium other then utm_medium=Email, then it will not be defined as being in the default Email channel.
Filters are not retroactive.
Filters also run after data has already been processed by Google, to only change how it displays in the reports as it gets sent back into the GA reports.
A Search and Replace Filter applied to the RequestURI for
?utm_medium=email&utm_source=salesloft is not going to have the result you want.
It will change the appearance of the RequestURI in reports, not actually change how that traffic is attributed.
Changes to the default Channel grouping are not retroactive, it should have affect going forward though.
To see the changes in historical data for the Channels, you would do best to create a custom Channel grouping at the View level, this can then be applied retroactively to the historic data.
There are a lot of very good articles and answers out there that explain (in detail) why we get spam referrals messing up Analytics data. Example results: how to automatically stop spam traffic in google analytics
What I want is a definitive solution...
If you only manage one analytics account, it would not be unreasonable to manually filter suspect domains, but even this is not sustainable. If you, like me, manage over 30 accounts and counting, it gets ridiculous. What is the long term solution?
Analytics data is important for making business decisions.
Is there some service that, like antivirus software, keeps updating its 'definitions' and constantly filters spam traffic?
How can we fight back?
And how can/is it already automated in a one-click solution?
You can try these 2 options to decrease referral spam:
Option 1 - Filter bots
Mark "Bot Filtering" option on on your Google Analytics View Settings. You will need to do it to all of your views
And also create a filter to exclude referral sources. To do this, create a new filter with options:
Filter Type: Custom
Exclude
Filter Field: Campaign Source
Filter Pattern: youporn-forum.uni.me|free-share-buttons.com|Get-Free-Traffic-Now.com|event-tracking.com|darodar.com
--> Also add other spam sources that you have
You can reuse the filter to multiple views.
And its also recommended to not apply these filters in your main view. Instead, create a copy of main view and use it to analyse your data.
Its not a permanent solution (you will need to add new spam sources from time to time).
Option 2 - Segment real users
You can also create a segment to filter only users that visited at least one page (it will filter spams):
Create a new segment
Advanced > Conditions
Filter | Sessions | Include
Screen Views | per session | > | 0
Then, when you are analyzing your data, use this segment to see only real users.
Not all spammers are blocked by Google Analytics (only up to 75% of bots can be blocked by google analytics). By adopting the following steps you can automate removing referrer spam:
Go to Acquisition>all traffic >refferals and a new window will be opened which shows sources from where your website get traffic
In this step select all website who have 0 or 100 % bounce rate and copy it and make a regular expression .the method for making expression is given below
Use "\." (escaped dot) between every part of the domain and use "|" (pipe) symbol to separate every link. E.g. consider your blog hits by two spammy URLs "ads123.abc59055xxb896.comtom" and "dd54.xy789z.usjpa" then we made following resultant expression:
"ads123\.abc59055xxb896\.comtom|dd54\.xy789z\.usjpa"
if you have any trouble in making regular expression then click here to see the complete process
Select the add filter option in admin tab and select include and paste the whole expression in the expression field and click on save
I am implementing cross domain tracking for a client. We will be using Universal Analytics with Google Tag Manager.
Let's say the client has three domains: example.com, example.de and example.se. We would like to have a master account that tracks everything, but we would also like to be able to drill down and see a single domains stats. Perhaps this already exists without any customization but I have been unable to find anything on how though.
What I can see there are two ways to go about:
Create a filter that automatically appends the domain to the tracked data. So instead of /about in my view, I would get example.com/about and example.se/about. But how would this work with event tracking? Is it possible to get a report the way the client want's?
Use custom variables and dimensions. This way I could set up a variable for Domain and send in before tracking the data. But will it be sufficient to get the reports wanted?
Appreciate any help.
Thank you,
Bjorn
Hostname ist already tracked, you can set it as second dimension to break down pageviews etc. by domain (works with events, too). However that is really cumbersome and most people follow the route you have outlined in Point 1. (Google suggest that themselves in their filter documentation) - however you'd still need hostname set as second dimension to break down by domain in the events report (or you create custom reports filtered by hostname for events for each domain).
Or you create segments based on hostname (since you can compare up to for segments that would allow you to compare the overall performance and domain performance).
Plus of course you can create additional views filtered by hostname and add the domain name only in the rollup-profile for all domains.
So there are several ways to do this somehow okay-ish, but nothing really better than the solutions you already came up with yourself.
I need to be able to track whether particular inbound links from an external site result in individual sales - is that possible with Google Analytics?
Goto Traffic Sources -> Sources-> Referals. Klick on the domain name to drill down to the url level. On the top of the page hit the "Ecommerce" Tab. This will give you the number of sales for that link, but not indivdual transactions.
If you need to get down to indivdual transactions your best bet is to ask the external site to add campaign parameters to the link (see here : http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033867), build a custom segement based on the campaign name and apply this to the conversions->transactions display.
On second thought, you might be able to build a segment based on the referal path (so no need for campaign parameters), but I haven't tested this. Worth a try, though.
In my google analytics account it is showing data from my local testing server. I've also got a fairly popular tutorial/demonstration on my site, that people copy the whole source code and put on there site without removing my google tracking code. So i'm getting info about their traffic.
I've had a look through the settings and couldn't find anything relevant. Is there some sort of filter I can apply to show more accurate results.
Thanks,
Paul
You can use an include filter.
Filter type: custom -> include
Filter field: Hostname
Filter pattern: yourdomain\.com
Case sensitive: no
Note that you can have multiple excludes filters but only one include filter per profile.
And, you should always create a different profile for filters. Keep a separate raw profile with no filters.