How To Block Ghost Spammers

Ever wonder why all those referrals sites are sending you traffic?

Actually, their NOT! They are ghost spammers and you need to become a Ghost Buster and take back your Google Analytics Accounts.

Ghost Spammers routinely attack your Google Analytics tracking code and falsify your referral traffic with inaccurate data. Directly striking the Google Analytics server via random tracking numbers and measurement protocol, ghost spammers can make it look like visitors have been to your website when in reality ghost spammers never even open a web page on your site.

To see if your analytics have become corrupted by ghost spammers, run a report in Google Analytics by clicking down into Audience > Technology > Network (or search the word Network); then click on Primary Dimension - Hostnames to view the listing of referral hostnames.

If you are seeing suspicious traffic referrals in your Google Analytics network reports, call us today and we will filter out the ghost spammers and make your reports more accurate.

STEPS TO GHOST BUSTING ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB:

Identify Valid Hostnames
To block ghost spammers, you first need to make a list of all the legitimate hostnames from the network report. For most sites the list will consist of the main domain, sub-domains and any add-on domains.
Create A Regex Expression
Once you have the complete valid list of hostnames, you need to create a regular expression.

List each of valid domain names with a pipe “|” in between them. Make sure there are no spaces in between domains and no pipe “|” at the end of the expression. In order to include all subdomains in a regex, you can add .* before the domain name. This will help to cover www. and non-www. versions of your domain. When complete your regex will look like this:

.*yourdomain.com|.*yourdomain.net|.*youtube.com|.*googleusercontent.com
Create A Filter
Next, you need to Create a Hostname Filter in Google Analytics. Go into admin settings and create a copy of the current view and name it "UnFiltered". Change the name on the original view to Master. Then click on Filters, type in Filter Name "Include Valid Hostnames". Click the Filter Type button Custom and Include. Set the Filter Field to Hostname and paste your regex into the Filter Pattern. Also, click the Bot Filtering checkbox. Save the filter and you will now block all future ghost spammers to the Master report.