Did You Know?
Referral spammers are wreaking havoc with your website traffic data when it is tracked and reported by Google Analytics. Like most folks, we use Google Analytics and rely heavily upon it. So just how big is the referral spam problem? That is the question we tried to answer. With the help of the BlizzardMetrics benchmarking tool, we looked at 77 websites and found that last month they averaged 210 junk visits each — up from 13.7 a year ago (this represented 42% of referral traffic and 5.3% of total site traffic overall).
This junk traffic came from 14.1 spammy referrer sites, on average.
If you’d like to try BlizzardMetrics (and add the 78th site), we welcome you to add your site to the system (still in beta). Basically, click here, and create an account. Then, authorize your Google Analytics Account(s) and BlizzardMetrics will analyze your data and provide anonymous analytics benchmarks by business category and size. Look in the “linking” tab for the referrer spam benchmark data. Hopefully you can figure it out!
Please keep in mind this product is still in beta, your feedback would be appreciated! It is free and your data is kept completely anonymous.
If you want to learn more about Spam Referrers here are some good articles:
- referrer-spam.help has a tool to remove spam from GA directly.
- Definitive Guide to Removing Referral Spam
- How to Remove Referral Spam
- Geek guide to removing referrer spam in Google Analytic
- How to Stop Spam Bots from Ruining Your Analytics Referral Data
A note for our customers: we have been adding spam filters to your Google Analytics to try to make your data more accurate. We should be done with this (at least for our maintenance clients) by the end of July – we will make sure to put an annotation into your Google Analytics so you know when the data was updated.
Colin Boyd
Hi,
Great article, we have just launched a free referrer spam toll that makes it really easy to build a htaccess to help stop referrer spam having an effect on google rankings, is free to use http://refererspamtool.boyddigital.co.uk/ a go and let me know what you think
Nancy
I’m so glad to see someone addressing this issue. I feel like I have been explaining this to clients and trying to stay ahead of it all summer. Thanks for the thorough research and explanation.
Tim
Realy useful article. Thx Trent!