How To: Filtering Referral Spam from Google Analytics

Today’s video features a quick way to filter referral website spam which appears in Google Analytics reports.

Problems caused by spammy referral traffic (fake traffic)

Inflated Session stats
Bounce rates inflated
Pageviews/session inflated
Unrealistic view of traffic

How to filter fake referrals in Google Analytics

Identify similarities in spammy referrals
Create a Spam Filter segment
Test

Google Analytics Spam

Here’s what Google Analytics spammy referrals look like.

Screenshot of Google Analytics Segment

Here’s what we used to filter spammy referrals in Google Analytics, customize as needed for your website(s).

Comment below with questions and comments on how to improve this. Enjoy! Learn more about Google Analytics on LearnDigitalAdvertising.com.

Rick Maggio2018-01-08T11:18:02+00:00Web Analytics|

About the Author: Rick Maggio

My name is Rick and I've enjoyed building websites and doing digital marketing (as a profession) since 2002. My background is mostly in search, social and email marketing. I specialize in data driven marketing and marketing automation on small and large scale. Reach out anytime!

2 Comments

Dawn Bell July 6, 2016 at 9:02 pm - Reply

really helpful. Still can’t seem to eliminate a few though. Free-Video-Tool.com, fix-website-errors.com, ones ending in RU. Even though i have set the segment rules. are there other ways to eliminate these?
- Rick Maggio July 7, 2016 at 8:10 pm - Reply
  
  Are they coming across as “referrals”? If so, you’d just need to set a filter for “referrer” “contains” “free” or similar.