How to Remove Referral Spam from Google Analytics

When you review your Google Analytics stats and see your pageviews growing each month, you want to believe those pageviews are all from real people visiting and finding value in your site. Most of them are, but some are not.

 

 

 

Referral spam (also called ghost referrals, crawlers, bots, and spiders) shows up in your referrals in Google Analytics and affects your pageviews and bounce rate. Some of these visit your site with the hope you will click back to their site. Others don’t actually even visit your site at all.

You can get a more accurate picture of your blog’s traffic if you remove referral spam from Google Analytics by following these steps:

1. Create a new view in Google Analytics.
2. Activate the bot filtering check box.
3. Create a filter to only allow hits to valid host names.
4. Create filters to remove additional known spam referrals.

How to Create a New View in Google Analytics

In my own Google Analytics, I use three separate “views” based on what traffic filters I am using. This allows me to compare traffic and confirm if the filters are doing what I want them to do.

Leave your “All Website Traffic” view intact and make your changes in a separate view so you can always refer back to a clean, unfiltered record if you need to.

To set up a new view, in your Google Analytics account go to the Admin tab in the gray bar at the top of the page.

Under the View column you should see a drop down box that shows your current view. That drop down box will give you the option to Create New View. You can have up to 25 different views but I am only suggesting adding one new view that includes each of the filters I will detail below.

Choose a name for your view and make sure you select your correct time zone.

You can always change the name later by returning to Admin Tab -> View Column ->  Select the view you want to change from drop down menu -> Click on View Settings.

This new view will have no data because it will only start capturing data from the time the view was created.

Filter #1: Remove Known Bots and Spiders

Your first (and easiest) line of defense against spam bots is to filter out spam bots Google is already prepared to block by using the Bot Filtering Check Box in Google Analytics.

You can do this by going to Admin Tab -> View Column ->  Select the view you want to change from drop down menu -> Click on View Settings.

In the next screen, check the box near the bottom of the screen that says Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders and click Save at the bottom.

Filter #2: Remove Ghost Referrals that Never Visit Your Site

Some pageviews come from ghost referrals that never even visited your site. They simply pick numbers randomly but never land on your blog’s host server.

To filter out these ghost referrals you need to create a filter to only allow hits to your own host name(s). First you need to know what host names are valid for your blog.

How to Find Your Own Valid Host Names

In your Google Analytics dashboard go to Audience -> Technology -> Network

Change the Primary Dimension, above the grid, from Service Provider to Hostname.

You will also want to change the date range from the past 30 days to the life of your blog (or whenever you started using Google Analytics).

Review the list of host names to determine which one are valid for your blog. Anywhere you have entered your Google Analytics tracking code would be a valid host name (i.e. email newsletter service, ecommerce shopping cart, YouTube channel).

In my case, I had my website URL and two URLs related to my Mail Chimp newsletter service that are valid host names. These are the host names I will use for setting up my new filter:

• www.revealnaturalhealth.com
• revealnaturalhealth.us3.list-manage.com
• us3.campaign-archive.com

Create View to Only Include Valid Host Names

Before following these steps, make sure you create a separate view in Google Analytics using the steps above. 

To add a new filter, go to the Admin tab. Under the View column on the far right, make sure the drop down shows the view you want to edit. Further down under the View column, find and select Filters.

On the next screen, click on the red + New Filter button.

• Choose a name for your filter.
• Select the Custom filter type.
• Select button to Include.
• Under filter field choose host name.

Under Filter Pattern, fill in all valid host names, as determined above. If you have more than one valid host name, separate each host name with a vertical line and no spaces.

In my case, my filter pattern looks like this:

www.revealnaturalhealth.com|revealnaturalhealth.us3.list-manage.com|us3.campaign-archive.com

You will need to update this filter if you add your Google Analytics code to a new tool, such as PayPal.

Filter #3: Remove Other Known Spam Referrals

Now that you have filtered out the bots and spiders Google is already prepared to block, and you have filtered the ghost referrals that never even hit your blog’s server, now it is time to remove other known spam referrals that pop up.

To add a new filter, go to the Admin tab -> View column -> select the view you want to edit -> select Filters.

Click on the red + New Filter button.

On the next screen:

• Choose a name for your filter.
• Select the Custom filter type.
• Select button to Exclude.
• Under Filter Field choose Campaign Source.

Under Filter Pattern fill the names that show up in your list of referrals that you know are not valid referrals (i.e. not social media sites, search engines or blogs that have linked to you).

In my case, I picked the ones that were still showing up after I had implemented the host name view. You can enter multiple referrals into the same filter by separating each name with a vertical line and no spaces.

Here’s what my filter pattern looks like:

semalt|best-seo-offer|buttons-for-website|buttons-for-your-website|100dollars-seo|videos-for-your-business|success-seo

New spam referrals may pop up, so be sure to check your stats monthly and update your filters as needed.

Additional Resources

I found this site helpful when I first set up my filters: Definitive Guide to Removing Referral Spam by Analytics Edge

It is also a good idea to add a filter to block hits from your own IP address. This will keep your own pageviews from falsely increasing your total pageviews (because, really, does anyone spend more time on your site than you do?). Here is a complete tutorial of How to Remove Your IP Address From Google Analytics.

Have you taken steps to remove referral spam from your Google Analytics stats?