Are your Google Analytics results all screwed up?

Hey everybody, haven't posted here in quite awhile. I've been up to my eyeballs in busy work, and just haven't had the time to post on the WF.

So with that being said, let me be among the first from the forum community to wish each of you a very merry Christmas, and happy holiday season.

OK turning to business...

I currently own and/or manage perhaps 50 websites and almost without exception, each of these sites caters to an audience specifically in the U.S. Not Canada, not Europe, Australia, other English speaking countries. And definitely not to Brazil, China, and especially not to Russia.

So here's the problem. I use Google Analytics a lot for my metrics for both my websites, and for my clients. Let's say that on average, any one of my websites will get roughly 300 visitors per week.

When you load up GA, and go to the Audience Overview page, you can scroll down, and immediately see the language breakdown of your visitors.

Let's see....out of 300 visitors last week,

89 were from Russia
45 were from China
41 were from the US
22 from Brazil


and this is from a website exclusively targeting US visitors only.

At first, all of that site traffic makes that little traffic chart in GA look pretty good, but there's a bunch of very sinister reasons why all of this 'bad' traffic is a problem.

First, these hits on your site completely skew (and screw up) your analytics metrics. If you dig down, you'll notice that every single one of these 'hits' spent 0.00 minutes on your website, unlike real visitors. The GA metrics created by these false hits completely twist and invalidate all of the metrics generated by 'good' visitors, and its impossible for you to glean any meaningful results. If GA reports that 175 out of 300 visitors have spent 0 time on your site, how does that twist the overall metric by the good visitors? GA has pretty much become useless to you.

There's two ways to deal with the problem.

While you're surfing through your Google Analytics account, travel down to 'Acquisition' | 'Channels'. Check out the 'Referrals' traffic, and then click the 'Referrals' link to view the actual sources of referrals traffic.

Lately some of the biggest violators for 'traffic spam' is a source called semalt.com. Every click they 'send' you is useless traffic spam, it's specifically designed to make you wonder who semalt.com is - go to their website, and then sign up for their useless traffic promotion program because, well, they send you so much 'traffic'. (Hint, try googling semalt.com).

In addition to semalt.com, there are a number of other sites affiliated with semalt (I think) that consistently show up on my GA account 'Referrals'.

7makemoneyonline.com
forums.darodar.com
buttons-for-website.com
and a few others; but these four 'sources' are the biggest violators.

So the first method of eliminating these crazy, trash traffic metrics from your GA account is to ban these biggest violators.

At the top of your GA screen, click on 'Admin'; you'll arrive at a page with 3 columns. In the RH column is an item 'Filters'. Click on that.

Click on the red button 'New Filters'.

In the text field, enter the filter name like 'Semalt.com exclusion'

Under the 'Filter Type' click the 'Custom' button

Click the 'Select Field' button and select 'Referral'

Scroll down to the bottom and click Save.

That's it.

Now just repeat this process for each one of the traffic spammers that's screwing with you.

Oh, and while you're at it, create an exclusion filter for your own IP address - this avoids having GA record your visits to your own website, and screwing up your metrics in a completely different context.

Sadly, this only cleans up, temporarily at least, your Google Analytics account. The problem is, these less than desirable people and their bots are still banging on your website 'door'. All these filters in GA do is pull the shades and turn up the TV volume so that you can't 'see or hear' them.

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Part Two -

There's a method, rather easy to implement, that will block all traffic to your website from a specific individual, a specific neighborhood, region, country, or continents, and it relates to their IP address. Basically if you can identify the ip addresses these 'bad' people are using, you can add that IP address to that odd looking .htaccess file you see when you log into your ftp area of your website.

Better yet, if you had a list of all of the 'bad' ip addresses, or knew the range of ip addresses from 'bad' countries, you could place that information into your .htaccess file on your website, and voila....no more traffic from Russia, China, Brazil, etc. Google Analytics wouldn't even need to filter this traffic out, it simply wouldn't even exist in the first place. They couldn't get access to your site to begin with.

So now the problem is getting a valid list of the IP addresses for these countries and for other known bad regions.

Visit Block Blog Spammers & Hostile Servers in Russia With Apache Web Server .htaccess IP Blocklist

This site regularly collects and updates their 'bad' guys ip list and sorts it out by country.

They also show you exactly how to plunk that info into your .htaccess file on your website.

One MAJOR caveat - be VERY careful when changing anything in your htaccess file. A small error can have the unintended consequence of taking your site completely down - not a good situation. It'd only be ironic if it was due to your attempts to keep other people from taking it down.

Hope this helps you solve a problem that I've been dealing with for some time.

Cheers everybody, and have a truly great, blessed holiday season.

Tom