Filtering crawler spam
As business owners we all know it’s important to add analytics to our website but often we don’t use the information that is gathered or we don’t check that the information being gathered is accurate. One way to ensure that the traffic stats coming into your Google Analytics account is to filter the ghost spam traffic.
What is ghost spam?
“Ghost spam earns its name because it never really visits your site. It’s sent directly to the Google Analytics servers using a feature called Measurement Protocol, a tool that under normal circumstances allows tracking from devices that you wouldn’t imagine that could be traced, like coffee machines or refrigerators” quoted by Carlos Escalera Alonso in his How to filter junk traffic post.
One of the reasons why it’s so important to filter this spam is that your bounce rate could be highly inflated due to this “fake traffic”. Fixing it can reduce this figure dramatically depending on how much ghost traffic is being directed to your website.
How to prevent it?
Go to your analytics admin and select filters:
Name your filter, select “Custom” for Filter Type, and specify that you want to “Include” “Hostname.”
Enter your expression, and use the “Verify Button” to triple-check your new filter.
Click “Save” to launch your ghost spam filter!
Hostname REGEX (example) Yourdomain.com|hostname2|hostname3|hostname4
Need help setting this up? Contact us at Colouring Department and we will set it up for free.