How to remove spambots from your referers in Google Analytics

Thursday, September 17, 2015

For a while now, a new problem has emerged on the web: spambots. These robots send false information to Google Analytics to either promote an ad or their services in your site referers.

Here are 3 tasks you could do on your website to remove these false statistics.

Remove from your past statistics

In Google Analytics, you can create data segments that you can either include or exclude. To know exactly which websites to exclude, look at your referals. If you find a link that doesn't have any link whatsoever with your business, if that link looks like an ad, or if they pass 0 time on your website and have a 100% bounce rate, you can assume that link is spam.

Follow these steps to create a data segment allowing you to remove these statistics: 

• In the "Admin" tab, in the "View" section, click on "Segment"
  
• Click on the "New segment" button
  
• Fill in the form by following these steps:
  • Enter your segment's name (e.g.: Exclude spambots);
  • In the left menu, click on "Conditions";
  • In the "Filter" section, select "Exclude";
  • In the first droplist, select "Source/medium";
  • In the textbox, enter the website you'll like to remove;
  • To add more than one link, click on the "OR" button;
  • Once you're done, click on "Save".
• You can activate this segment by:
  • Clicking on the "Select a segment in your list";
  • In the left menu ,select "Personnalized";
  • Select the segment you just created (e.g.: Exclude spambots);
  • Click on the "Apply" button.
     

By following all these steps, all those false statistics will be removed from your Analytics.

Remove from your future statistics

Of course, prevention is better than cure! All you need to do is follow these easy steps to prevent those spambots from enter your statistics in the first place:

• In the "Admin" tab, in the "Properties" section, click on "Tracking data" and selection "Exclusion list for site referers";
  
• Click on the "Add an exclusion for site referers" button;
  
• Enter the address of the site you would like to exclude and click on "Create".
  

Once these steps complete, you'll remove pre-emptively all the statistics coming from those websites.

Block them before they access your site

There's one more task you could do to help even more to filter out those spambots would be to block them before they even access your website. For this, though, you'll need some help from your webmaster.

You could ask your webmaster to block directly all requests that come from these websites (usually via the .htaccess file). That way, not only will you prevent those bots from sending you false information, you'll also gain the system ressources that would've otherwise been used to process these false requests.