Helpful Practice From Semalt: How To Remove Spam Traffic In Google Analytics

The digital marketers want to drive more traffic to their websites, and the only way is to trick the users' Google Analytics accounts. They use web crawlers for generating false visits all over the world. Fake traffic might boost your search engine ranks but are meaningless for your business. When you get access to your Google Analytics account, you should quickly find out how accurate or polluted its data is. The chances are that you will observe spam traffic in your Google Analytics account. For small-sized organizations, it might account for up to thirty percent of the sessions. There are various side effects of spam traffic, and you cannot depend on the general information. Spam traffic can corrupt the understanding of visitor profile.

Try to fix it as soon as possible with the following compelling tips from Alexander Peresunko, a top expert from Semalt Digital Services.

Is your analytics data affected?

Probably yes, but to be sure, you should log into the Google Analytics account and browse to the Aquisition > All Traffic > Referrals. Here you should observe the unknown referral sources that might have low or extremely high bounce rate, a short time spent on the website, and a high rate of new visitors. For such websites, over fifty percent visitors come from the referrals, and ninety percent traffic is spam and meaningless. That's why you should clean it as soon as possible if you want to get an improved view of your data.

Remove spam traffic in Google Analytics:

If you want to clean up the views, you should have a backup of your files. You may want to get rid of the polluted raw and make a new one, but the new view will not be able to hold the historical data.

Duplicate the Google Analytics view:

1. Go to the Admin section and add the new view in the property.

2. In the new view, you should go to the View Settings section and click on the "Bot Filtering: Exclude the hits from known spiders and bots" option. It will help but cannot fix the problem by the whole.

Find the valid hostnames:

The spammers cannot do their jobs properly and do not set the hostnames. In the "raw" section, you should go to the Audience > Technology > Network option and switch to the hostname. Make sure you have selected a wide time range. Here you will see a large number of URLs. You should copy all of the valid URLs using the domain name and the aliases. The next step is to create filters in the New View section, which will include traffic from the valid hostnames. Go to the Admin section and click on Create A New Filter option. Here, you should include the hostname and fill up the patterns of your filter.

Exclude the additional crawler spam:

You can go one step forward and exclude the additional spam from the web crawlers. In the Filter section, you should create a new custom filter. This time, you would have to choose the Campaign Source and don't forget to paste the following code in this field:

Now, your Google Analytics data is clean, and this is the right time to track your conversions.