Ban a URL from showing up in Google Analytics - google-analytics

All,
There is a website that doesn't seem legitimate that and keeps showing all of these page views in my google analytics. Is there a way to ban certain URLs from being processed in google analytics?

You can make an IP address not show up by adding it to a filter.
Please look at http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55481, even though it talks about excluding internal addresses, it should work well as a guide how to do it with the "difficult" site too.
Edit: To filter on referrals you need to create a custom filter.
See http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55492 for a guide.
http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=1034830&answer=1034842 talks specifically about excluding referrers.
Note that the filters will only act on future data, the referrals that are already collected will still show up.

Related

Real-Time Data shows visits of pages that don't exist for the selected domain

In Google Analytics, I have navigated to All Accounts-> SomeDomain.
I see a lot of traffic to that domain.
However, most pages listed there are from another domain of mine.
Real-Time for example shows this:
This is hilarious because this page doesn't exist on that domain.
I thought that it shows only traffic to the domain that I have selected above after "All accounts".
Is that not correct?
Or does anybody know any situation where this might happen?
This goes on since months already.
My GA is managed via GTM.
I don't use any CMS.
In GTM, I have a GA Page View Trigger:
I don't see where I could have made a mistake.
Does anybody do?
Thank you.
Create a custom report with dimension Hostname and metric Sessions (for example). You'll see what domains send data to your GA Property.
May be somebody stole code of your site (including trackers).
You can filter alien domains in GA settings for View.
UPD. Lookup table to push GA ID's depending on Hostname.

Filtering out ghost traffic from Google Analytics

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"

QR code tracking in Google Analytics

I would like to track visitors sent to a website from different QR-codes. The QR-codes are unfortunately not created with google url builder. The problem, as I understand it, is that these visitors will only show as direct traffic to the different pages to where the Qr-codes points. Is there any good way to segment this traffic from other direct traffic to the same pages?
You will either need to:
Create a unique (sub) domain like qr.example.com/whatever
Create a unique get request like example.com/whatever?from=qr
Assume that everyone visiting your site from a mobile, with no referrer header set scanned your QR.
That's about all you can do.

Google Analytics question, how do I know the number of my own visits?

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.

Does anyone use Google Analytics? How Google does it to avoid counting the owner of the website as visitor?

I don't want to be counted as visitor every time I test my page in the hosting. Does Google know i'm the owner of the site by checking if i'm logged in my Gmail account?
I don't think Google does anything like this automatically. But they do provide instructions for excluding based on IP address (or range) and apparently also now by cookie. If you use a CMS or admin interface, you could put the code they provide in an HTML file that you then include into the admin interface pages by IFRAME (to ensure that the cookie stays set for anyone who uses that interface).
One option is to install Ghostery addon your browser. Ghostery can block trackers and scripts used on webpages likes google analytics, google adword and other adwares.
You can also block or unblock the trackers for a specific site or specific tracker for a particular site.This add on is available for Firefox and chrome browsers. If you have this installed on your browser, your visit wont be counted as google analytic script wont be executed.
You can learn more about ghostery at: http://www.ghostery.com/about
There are also often application specific ways of blocking google from counting administrators. For example I've used a wordpress analytics plugin that would automatically not include the tracking code if the user was logged in as an administrator. If you are application has the concept as admin then you could write something similar that controls when the code is added.
If you visit your site frequently from connections with a dynamic IP address, eg. home broadband, then excluding IP addresses is not particularly practical. To go beyond IP exclusion, you can create an isolated page on your site that only you know about that includes a call to Analytics to label your cookie.
The Google Analytics _setVar() function lets you label yourself with an arbitrary string, eg. 'internal'. You only need to do this once per browser as long you don't clear your cookies.
Having labelled yourself as 'internal', you can create an Advanced Segment within Google Analytics to exclude visitors with that label.
Google Analytics relay on you embedding a call to their JavaScript see this link - do not confuse it with how Google does page ranking.
So the answer to your question is that your pages should be smart enough to recognize when the request comes from you and skip the call to the JavaScript.

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