Have you noticed a large number of referral visits in your analytics report that look bogus? You might be suffering from Ghost Spam a condition that is affecting a large number of users. Unfortunately Google Analytics hasn't got a solution to block these well known spammers and the only way is to manually filter them out of your profile!
You might have read other articles explaining the use of .htaccess files to block referral SPAM, the team at Rocketspark is already on top of this and is constantly updating this for all our Rocketspark customers.
What's happening is your analytics profile is receiving Ghost SPAM, the spammers aren't actually visiting your site they are simply submitting referral visits directly to your Analytics profile using some tricky software.
To stop Ghost Spam, you must create a filter in Google Analytics to block it:
In your Google Analytics, go to the Admin tab.
Under the Account Column select All Filters
Click, New Filter
Give your Filter a name then Pick the Custom tab and set Campaign Source under the Exclude option.
In the Filter Pattern this is where you must paste a list of all the domains you want to block from your referral traffic. Notice how they are separated by the pipe character, thats the vertical line usually located on your keyboard on the backslash key. Use SHIFT + \ (backslash) to type this in. You can add multiple domains here but the entire field is limited to 255 characters, not enough for all of them, so you may need to repeat this process twice to filter out all the sites.
Here is two lists ready to paste into separate filters which have all of the spam sites we know about:
Copy Paste list 1:
floating-share-buttons.com|free-social-buttons.com|Get-Free-Traffic-Now.com|simple-share-buttons.com|pornhub-forum.ga|best-seo-offer.com|best-seo-solution.com|social-buttons.com|darodar.com|buttons-for-your-website.com|buttons-for-website.com
Copy Paste list 2:
7makemoneyonline.com|semalt.com|kambasoft.com|savetubevideo.com|econom.co|iloveitaly.
ru|ilovevitaly.info|ilovevitaly.org|ilovevitaly.com
Next in the apply filter to views section, click to highlight on the left the profiles you want to apply this filter to. Usually you will just have one here but the pros might have more. Click the Add button and the profiles you will apply it to will move to the right hand list.
Click the Save button and you are done! Just remember that the filter only removes these SPAM sites from the time that you add it. So you will need to wait a few days before you notice the effects in your reports.
You might have read other articles explaining the use of .htaccess files to block referral SPAM, the team at Rocketspark is already on top of this and is constantly updating this for all our Rocketspark customers.
What's happening is your analytics profile is receiving Ghost SPAM, the spammers aren't actually visiting your site they are simply submitting referral visits directly to your Analytics profile using some tricky software.
To stop Ghost Spam, you must create a filter in Google Analytics to block it:
Step 1
In your Google Analytics, go to the Admin tab.
Step 2
Under the Account Column select All Filters
Step 3
Click, New Filter
Step 4
Give your Filter a name then Pick the Custom tab and set Campaign Source under the Exclude option.
Step 5
In the Filter Pattern this is where you must paste a list of all the domains you want to block from your referral traffic. Notice how they are separated by the pipe character, thats the vertical line usually located on your keyboard on the backslash key. Use SHIFT + \ (backslash) to type this in. You can add multiple domains here but the entire field is limited to 255 characters, not enough for all of them, so you may need to repeat this process twice to filter out all the sites.
Here is two lists ready to paste into separate filters which have all of the spam sites we know about:
Copy Paste list 1:
floating-share-buttons.com|free-social-buttons.com|Get-Free-Traffic-Now.com|simple-share-buttons.com|pornhub-forum.ga|best-seo-offer.com|best-seo-solution.com|social-buttons.com|darodar.com|buttons-for-your-website.com|buttons-for-website.com
Copy Paste list 2:
7makemoneyonline.com|semalt.com|kambasoft.com|savetubevideo.com|econom.co|iloveitaly.
ru|ilovevitaly.info|ilovevitaly.org|ilovevitaly.com
Step 6
Next in the apply filter to views section, click to highlight on the left the profiles you want to apply this filter to. Usually you will just have one here but the pros might have more. Click the Add button and the profiles you will apply it to will move to the right hand list.
Step 7
Click the Save button and you are done! Just remember that the filter only removes these SPAM sites from the time that you add it. So you will need to wait a few days before you notice the effects in your reports.