![\"Filter](\"https:\/\/www.silkstream.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/filter-referrer-spam.png\")
<\/h2>\n<\/h2>\nWith smaller websites especially, you may have noticed the huge swarm of annoying referral spam that has been plaguing our Google Analytics in recent months. In fact, if you’ve just launched a new website and aren’t yet pushing for much traffic, if you sort your traffic by Bounce Rate, it might look a little like this:<\/p>\n
![\"Spam](\"https:\/\/www.silkstream.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/spam-traffic-google-analytics.png\")
<\/p>\n
Gross, right? An eighth of the website’s traffic is from a single spammy website. Just sitting there, screwing up my analytics. Of course, you could exclude them right there and then as you’re browsing. But they’ll keep popping up, infecting your data with more fake traffic… You need to get rid of them once and for all.<\/p>\n
Those figures above seem small, but they add up and can skew your website data massively depending on the incoming traffic\u00a0of your website. Giving you the wrong figures for things such as conversation rates, bounce rates, and a whole load of other metrics in addition to just pageviews and visits.<\/p>\n
Referrer spam\u00a0can be dangerous.<\/strong> You may see some suspicious referrals coming from websites containing the word “blackhat<\/strong>” or even websites that seem to be offering free tools or services. Recently I’ve even seen referral spam coming from\u00a0howtostopreferralspam.eu<\/em><\/strong> –\u00a0DO NOT VISIT! <\/strong>If you are curious, you can google the website and see what it’s about from a different source or forum. Website domains may even imitate popular websites using a misspelled variant of the popular domain name, so that you click through to the website to see where your website was mentioned.<\/p>\n The reason these websites exist and are spamming your Google Analytics like this is because they\u00a0want<\/em> you to visit their website<\/strong>. Whether it’s to download adware<\/strong> or malware<\/strong>, or to show you a whole bunch of ads which make them money. They aren’t spamming your analytics for fun; it’s their business.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are two main types of this Google Analytics spam: the annoying web crawlers which you can block from accessing your website (and therefore your analytics) using .htaccess, and ghost referrals<\/strong><\/span>. Ghost referrals don’t actually visit your website in the first place, so blocking them in your .htaccess will do nothing.<\/p>\n This solution will only prevent referral spam from appearing in your Google Analytics.<\/strong><\/span> Annoying, attention-seeking web crawlers will still be able to access your website but\u00a0their visit won’t<\/em> be\u00a0recorded in Analytics, unless you block them in your .htaccess too.<\/p>\n Google highly recommends that webmasters always<\/em>\u00a0maintain one view that collects\u00a0all\u00a0<\/em>website data, with no filters to alter the data. (In fact, this even comes up in the Google Analytics Certification exam that you should always keep one unfiltered view!) This is so that you are always able to have access to all incoming traffic and data, should you need it.<\/p>\n Creating a new “Master View” (by which I mean the view that you will most likely be checking everyday) is easy. It’s as easy as clicking on Create new view<\/strong><\/span>, where you will be able to name your view. And that’s all there is to it. Once you’ve named your view, it’s right there for you to do with it what you please. By default, it will just be unfiltered. Filters do not work retroactively, so I recommend creating the filter as soon as you have your view, before any spam gets in.<\/p>\n In the account’s Admin, once you have selected your new View, you can click on Filters<\/strong><\/span> and\u00a0+ New Filter<\/strong><\/span>. Where you will see the\u00a0Add Filter To View<\/strong><\/span> page:<\/p>\n You can name your Filter whatever you want to help you remember what the filter actually does. You want to set your Filter Type<\/strong><\/span> to Custom<\/strong><\/span>, so that you can Exclude<\/strong><\/span> by Campaign Source<\/strong><\/span> in the Filter Field<\/strong><\/span>.<\/p>\n And then in the Filter Pattern, you can type out or paste in the REGEX pattern to block your spam. The one in this example will block all of the main ones that pop up, so feel free to copy and paste this:<\/p>\n .<\/strong> \u00a0 \u00a0Any character<\/span> You can add to or replace the REGEX above with your most common spam referrers. Make sure that every dot (.) has a backslash (\\) in front of it as you literally do mean a . and not “any character” as a dot would usually signify in REGEX. The backslash “escapes” the following character<\/p>\n If you frequently get hit by any other\u00a0fake referral websites, you should add them in to the pattern or create a new filter to add them in. You may need more than one filter to filter all these websites as there is a character limit of 255<\/strong><\/span> for filter patterns.<\/p>\n New websites will in time pop up, and it’s important to keep on top of this. You can add to or edit your filters whenever you want, or simply create a new one.<\/p>\n There are too many to list… but these guys seem to pop up the most!<\/p>\n![\"Divider\"](\"https:\/\/www.silkstream.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/logo-divider.png\"){kind=logo}
<\/p>\nHow To Filter Referrer\u00a0Spam in Google Analytics Using REGEX<\/h2>\n
1) Create a Master View – Don’t create new filters on your main All Website Data view!<\/h3>\n
![\"Filter](\"https:\/\/www.silkstream.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/filter-internal-ip-google-analytics.png\")
<\/p>\n2) Create your Fake Referral Spam filter<\/h3>\n
![\"Add](\"https:\/\/www.silkstream.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/add-spam-filter-analytics.png\")
<\/p>\n\nFake Referrer Filter REGEX Example:<\/h3>\n
darodar\\.|buttons-for.*?website|blackhatworth|ilovevitaly|prodvigator|cenokos\\.|ranksonic\\.|adcash\\.|share.?buttons\\.|social.?buttons\\.|hulfingtonpost\\.|best-seo-(solution|offer|service)|free.*traffic|buy-cheap-online|100dollars-seo<\/strong><\/pre>\n
REGEX Tips for Google Analytics Filters:<\/h3>\n
\n\\<\/strong> \u00a0 \u00a0Escape following character<\/span>
\n*<\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0 More than 0 of previous character<\/span>
\n?<\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0 1 or 0 of the previous character
\n<\/span>| \u00a0 \u00a0<\/b>“Or”<\/span>
\n<\/b>() \u00a0 \u00a0<\/strong>Matches group of characters<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n3)\u00a0Edit your Fake Referral Spam Filter for any new spam sites<\/h3>\n
![\"Referral](\"https:\/\/www.silkstream.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/referral-spam-filtered-view.png\")
<\/p>\nSpam Referrers to Filter:<\/h2>\n