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1. 

   Yatin Mulay June 18, 2015, 1:44 pm

   The direct traffic that you’re seeing is most likely actually referral spam traffic. Unfortunately, as you might be already aware that there isn’t a permanent solution to this menace yet. Your 3 options are:

   1) Use Google’s default known bot filtering option. This will block all the IAB known bots/ spiders. This is the weakest solution of all, but it’s the only one which is readymade available.
   ( Admin=>View Settings=>Bot Filtering (Exclude traffic from all the known bots/spiders) ]

   2) If you’re on Apache, hack your htaccess in the root to block the known offenders. Here’s a sizable list of referral spammers: https://perishablepress.com/blacklist/ultimate-referrer-blacklist.txt

   (Please ask your system admin whether increasing the size of htaccess to this level would affect server performance or not and then take an informed decision. )

   Alternatively, you can write a REGEX filter from within the GA interface to exclude these known spam bots. The disadvantage is that, it’s a never ending process since newer spam bots keep on mushrooming.

   3) Write a valid hostname filter to include traffic from only known hostnames. Since your site is brand new, this can be a little challenging since there won’t be many valid hostnames yet in your data, but you can always start with your own domain name, known search engines and known sites. This is by far the most robust option out of the 3.

    Unfortunately, there is no full proof & easy solution to the spam menace. Google is well aware of the issue but i have not seen them do anything about it except for releasing the option#1 above in 2014.

   #my2cents

2. 

   Amit Shroff June 18, 2015, 3:40 pm

   Hi Yatin,

   I am aware of 3 options share with you and had been using it. It is really surprising to see such traffic. Above all no reaction from google. I have also noticed is most of my website that max bounce rate is either from direct traffic or referral. 

   My major concern till yesterday even the website was not resolving and neither I had implemented the analytics. So how come google recorded these visit.

   Some how I am getting a feeling that these are google own spam traffic. Correct me if I am wrong!

   Regards,
   Amit

3. 

   Yatin Mulay June 18, 2015, 4:32 pm

   hi Amit, all the user-agents of Google are in public domain and well documented. GOOG has no reason whatsoever to pollute their own data. The problem is how Analytics works at the core.

   The Ghost Referrals don’t actually go to your site at all. Referrer is simply a HTTP header that’s passed along when browser goes from one page to another and users can change it . Spammers set the referrer to pages they want to drive traffic to. They take advantage of a loop hole in how Google Analytics works behind the scenes.

   When a visitor visits your site, they run the GA Javascript snippet and that sends a ‘ping’ to the Google Analytics servers with information about the website visited (identified by your UA-#######-# tracking ID), a unique user ID (that is supposed to come from a cookie on your computer), the page viewed, the server hostname and the referral source. The spammers send millions of fake ‘ping’s with specially crafted information — and their website information as the referral source.

   If you visit analytics solution gallery, there’s a very good solution by analyticsedge to deal with this spam menace & they’ve a detailed post dealing with this issue. 

4. 

   Amit Shroff June 18, 2015, 7:34 pm

   Hey Yatin how do I use Analytic Solution Gallery? I still don’t know if a account is created 2 days back and website not into existence how could a spammer know about your unique id, until they hack into google server. Just curious to find out.. 

5. 

   Yatin Mulay June 19, 2015, 5:24 am

   Analytics solutions gallery has a lot of readymade dashboards / custom reports / advanced segments useful for presenting the data / extracting actionable insights quickly without you having to reinvent the wheel.

   If you go to either Dashboards / Customization /  New Segment tab in your analytics for any profile, you’d see an IMPORT FROM GALLERY  button.

   You can select the dashboard / custom report / segment that you wish to import within your own profile and with a single click it’s imported and applied to your data. It’s pretty straightforward , simple & extremely efficient method to extract actionable insights in the least amount of time.

   All the custom segments, dashboards are non-destructible to the data and you can revert/delete them any time you wish. If you are anxious, you can always create a test profile to play in the sandbox before deploying on a  live view. Recommend to stay with analytics solutions from known names / with good amount of 5* ratings.

   As regards how spammers are able to have all that data, well as you may already know nothing much is difficult for determined spammers.  We focus on what is under our control.

   Hope this helps. All the best.

6. 

   Amit Shroff June 19, 2015, 9:40 am

   Yatin.. this is lovely.. i never knew about it.. there so much to learn and you can do with Google Analytics.. how do you keep yourself update.. Some tips and guidance..;)

7. 

   Amit Shroff June 23, 2015, 5:33 pm

   Yatin do you have any idea about facebook report.. need some help..!! Like one of my post says 6.2k Impression and 287 Click… so couldn’t understand how come these click don’t reflect on google analytic…

8. 

   Puneet Nirogam Aggarwal June 23, 2015, 5:50 pm

   Amit, 
   If you want someone to setup the correct filters for you, so that you can get clean reports in Google Analytics, you can look at a readymade service costing US$50 : See – https://www.ohow.co/personal-service-for-advanced-spam-filters/

9. 

   Amit Shroff June 24, 2015, 4:00 am

   Thanks Puneet!!

10. 

    Amit Shroff June 24, 2015, 8:06 pm

    Puneet, I have been able to control and referral spam.. but the major issue is happening with direct traffic do you know any ways to control that.

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