Semalt Expert Specifies How To Deal With Referral Spam In Google Analytics

If you observe that your website receives a lot of referral traffic and the data is shown in your Google Analytics, you are not alone as a lot of people have faced the same problem. Most of the referral traffic is spam and should be gotten rid of as soon as possible. New surges of referral spam are damaging the data in Google Analytics to a great extent. The attackers not only destroy your site’s ranking in the search engine results but also get better ranks for their own websites and blogs. The problem is that how small businesses can deal with referral spam and increase the number of views on their sites.

Ivan Konovalov, the Customer Success Manager of Semalt, provides here a valuable solution regarding referral spam.

Attackers generate spam in Google Analytics

The first question that strikes our mind is that why do the attackers and hackers create Google Analytics spam? Website owners and bloggers keep an eye on Google Analytics and change its settings once in a while. They remove and block the IP addresses that look suspicious and are preventing the real humans from visiting your web pages. A lot of hackers use referral spam to generate and fake sales leads. Plus, they use it to spread viruses and malware and conduct phishing attacks every day. If you happen to see some suspicious websites in your referral data, you should never click that site and get it removed from the Google Analytics as early as possible.

How does referral spam occur?

The hackers and spammers use a variety of techniques to run bots and hijack computer systems in the botnets. Some of them generate lots of ghost visits and increase the bounce rate of your site. They continue sending bots to your sites, ruining its overall ranking on the internet. The attackers need to run JavaScript to track your Google Analytics. From here, they collect data and necessary information about your site and get involved in the fraudulent activities.

With the passage of time, Google has introduced a lot of products and services to ensure your site’s safety and security online. You can use its features and options to keep your site protected from the hackers. Tracking can be done with unique numbers for all properties. One property means you can use one track number or code for it to guess whether your site is receiving legitimate traffic or not.

Google Analytics lets its users use up to fifty properties per account. It means if you own an AdSense, you should get one serial number per property. The UA number, which means Urchin Analytics, is the name of the product Google has acquired for years for its users. Its middle digits are the actual account number you should use while creating a property. All of the properties in one Google Analytics account can share the same number.

Also, Google Analytics provides us with filtering options. It is straightforward to create filters and update the Analytic settings as per new trends and tactics. Plenty of guides and tutorials are available on the internet for getting rid of referral spam. You can maintain the quality of your data in Google Analytics by adjusting the settings.