Google Analytics Spam in January

If you’re the kind of one that checks your web site Google Analytics typically you may need seen a spike in visitors on the finish of January or early February.

The very first thing to know is that that is spam. It was added by a number of thousand bots coming from totally different IP addresses. This may throw off your whole analytics & reporting system, so let’s see if we are able to stop such a spam shifting ahead.

Create an Unfiltered View in GA

One of the perfect options of Google Analytics is which you can setup a number of views. Each view will get the very same knowledge however you’ll be able to filter out totally different items of that knowledge. There’s a number of nice issues about views.

One of them is which you can create an Unfiltered view. This shall be your backup view that collects all knowledge. 

Knowing you have got an unfiltered view then it’s time to create a number of views that removes any unimportant knowledge. I even have 3 views. The unfiltered view, my grasp view, and a check view for experimentation.

On my Master view with my filters – I take away stop a complete bunch of information from coming in:

• My dwelling IP deal with
• An IP deal with I typically work from
• And just a few sorts of spam I’ve seen in earlier years

Setting Up a Filter in Google Analytics

We’re going to do all the work at the moment in your non-unfiltered view – in my case I name that the Master view.

Here’s how we setup the filter:

1. Go to Admin -> Filters
2. Click Add Filter
3. Configure the filter
   1. Give the filter a descriptive title like “2021Q1BotSpam”. I’d keep away from names like “bot spam” since just a few years from now there may be new kind of bot spam.
   2. Filter kind: Predefined
   3. Exclude | visitors to the subdirectories | That are equal to
   4. /trafficbot.reside|/trafficbot.life|/bot-traffic.icu|/bot-traffic.xyz – it’s possible you’ll solely see one or two of those in your analytics. But in case you take a look at the occasion globally you’ll find these 4 directories. You may as nicely block all of those
4. (Optional) “Verify this filter”. Feel free to confirm the filter if you want. I’ve seen others use these very same filters they usually don’t confirm.
5. Save

Here’s what it ought to seem like when it’s full.

Once you’ve completed this, the filter is saved and any future knowledge from spam bots shall be ignored in this view. If for any purpose you tousled, you have got your Raw / Unfiltered view which you’ll reference.

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