Google Analytics is an immensely powerful free service to track and report website traffic. If you’re already using Google Analytics, you’ll most likely have noticed some unhelpful spam traffic from any number of sites such as theguardlan.com, social-buttons.com, get-free-traffic-now.com and a whole slew of others. In this post, I’m going to give you four tips to help reduce spam traffic.

Why do you need another solution to remove spam traffic?

In short, spammers constantly find new and tactical ways to cause chaos, so we have to adjust. New methods include camouflaging traffic in the form of real organic searches, so each time you detect a new spam site, you have to include it in the filter to prevent any future traffic.

Often when launching a new website or start tracking traffic, you’ll get a lot of spam visits:

Bot Filtering

The first and the most important step you can take is to enable the Bot Filtering checkbox from Admin > View Settings.

You’re already on your way to reducing the amount of spam traffic, but with these three extra filters, you may even be able to eliminate it entirely.

Adding a Valid Hosts Filter

Some bots don’t even attempt to check your website’s domain before sending traffic spam onto Google Analytics. So you can eliminate more spam by adding a valid host filter in, making sure any traffic coming in is from your domain.

1. From the Admin view, click on Filters.
2. Add a name for the filter.
3. Select Custom for the Filter Type.
4. From the radio checkboxes, select Include.
5. Select Hostname from the Filter Field dropdown.
6. Add your domain name into the text field, If you wish to enter multiple domains, you can separate using them using a pipe |.

Excluding Spam Referrals

Many spam referrals contain common words or phrases such as ‘seo’, ‘buttons’ or ‘porn’. If your site doesn’t target this market you can safely exclude them.

1. From the Admin view, click on Filters.
2. Add a name for the filter.
3. Select Custom for the Filter Type.
4. From the radio checkboxes, select Exclude.
5. Select Campaign Source from the Filter Field dropdown.
6. Add ‘seo|porn|button|cheap’ or any other spam words relative to you. Like domain filtering, if you wish to enter multiple, you can separate using them using a pipe |.

Exclusion by Screen Resolution

Some spam bots don’t set a Screen Resolution parameter, so excluding these bots with another filter will help you to remove even more spam visits.

1. From the Admin view, click on Filters.
2. Add a name for the filter.
3. Select Custom for the Filter Type.
4. From the radio checkboxes, select Exclude.
5. Select Screen Resolution from the Filter Field dropdown.
6. Add ‘not set’ in the Filter Pattern field.

Just implementing these four tips can help you to hugely reduce and possibly even eliminate spam traffic in your Google Analytics reports. Do you have any other tips for reducing spam? Let us know!

Jordi Giménez

Jordi has worked as a project manager, developer and security analyst in web, iOS and Android. He’s worked for companies big and the small in government, banking, insurance, healthcare and IT.