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It's pretty annoying that I have to create spam filters for Google Analytics to be useful. Every site I've installed GA on has required me to filter out spam. I
by jameslk 10y ago
It's pretty annoying that I have to create spam filters for Google Analytics to be useful. Every site I've installed GA on has required me to filter out spam. I don't understand why something isn't done about it at an engineering level. If site owners can set up filters against spammers, is it really that hard for Google to do it? Especially since they can see it across their accounts. Seems like it's the same type of issue that plagues email, yet Google seems to have that under control.
- throwawaydbfif 10y agoYou can get around this with some fairly simple hacks. Write some JavaScript that evals a part of your page or something crazy like loading part of itself from Rot13 text file. Have this js generate an ID you can identify as 'real' or 'fake'. Filter your analytics by this ID. If you want to be extra funny make real and fake IDs look indistinguishable to human eyes. 99.9% of spammers are too lazy to spend any time figuring this out for a single site, and their tools won't even tell them spam isn't working. I've gotten away with adding a simple static ID to everything and except for really large juicy targets spammers don't even watse time on this. All of my sites get zero spam with this filter
- joshdance 10y agoCan you elaborate on that? How do you make the real and fake ids?
- netzone 10y agoI assume he means something like the real ids being divisible by 2, while the fake ids are not.
- throwawaydbfif 10y agoThe spammer bots are so dumb that using anything besides default "pageview" events seems to work
- seattlekiwi 10y agoCan you share any details on this implementation? Sounds really interesting.
- flamtap 10y agoI love me a good honeypot.
- pedalpete 10y agoCan you elaborate as to what sort of spam you are referring to? Do you mean bots viewing your pages? Or is it something else?
- gressquel 10y agoHe is probably talking about the infamous "vitaly referrer spam". It shows up on the referrer tab of GA dashboard with a really long domain like "merry.christmas.go.to.this.link.to.get.a.price.vitaly.com".
- whatever_dude 10y agoReferral spam. Pretty common nowadays. Plenty of articles talking about it and showing how to filter it. https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your-analytics-referral-data https://moz.com/blog/how-to-stop-spam-bots-from-ruining-your...
- bartread 10y agoAs others have said, referer (sic) spam. Bots often show up in your logs but not Google Analytics if they don't execute JS.