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English: example of work in progress General field: Tech/Engineering Detailed field: Internet, e-Commerce
Source text - English The rise of referrer spam in your analytics
Do you recently notice some inexplicable referrers in your Google Analytics reports? These are malicious referrer spams. Learn to block them.
Bots vs. Human: who runs the web?
If you monitor your website analytics, you probably have recently seen an increase in visits. While this is typically cause for celebration, unfortunately you have to be suspicious. Are they real human or robots? Today, bots are as active as ever and represent up to 50% of web traffic.
Not all bots are bad. Some of them even contribute to improve our user experience on the web. The best example is Googlebot that indexes contents and web pages in its search engine to help us quickly find what we are looking for.
But another kind of bots do not have such good intentions. They execute malicious functions and cause confusion in web analytics reporting system. More recently, Google Trends shows an exponential increase of bad bots in search engine queries involving referral spam as well as ghost referrer spam which are even more difficult to control.
Help you monitor your analytics on a healthy base and ensure your to measure cleaner data is a key objective of the xxxxx development team. Who are these referrer spams? What are they doing? And how to block them? It is now necessary to ask these questions and answer them in order to preserve the validity of your performance indicators and reach your marketings goals.
Referrer spam and ghost referral spam: trouble makers bots in your analytics
Referrer spam also known as referral spam is a very specific kind of spamdexing, which means spamming aimed at search engine queries. In the field of web analytics, they represent a recent expanding trend that misleadingly inflates the number of visits on a website from a referred source. In other words, referrer spam are fake traffic sources pretending to redirect visitors to your site and then giving you a false picture of your popularity.
This referrer spam technique involves making repeated requests using a fake referrer URL to the target website. The purpose of the spammers is double : improve their ranking on search engines by indexing (via access logs) these bulk generated links, as well as generate revenue by tricking webmasters and webmarketers into visiting the malicious websites reported as referrers in their analytics.
Over the years, referral spam bots have become more and more sophisticated. The last generation of them send fake visits data without even visiting your website, simply by getting your analytics tracking code or Google Analytics property ID that is actually public information because it must be included in every tracked webpage on your site.These ghost referrals spam are particulary painful because that bypass traditional methods of dealing with referrer spam.
How referrer spam data affect your analytics?
The number of complaints about referrer spams have recently increased exponentially and they are more and more worrying about the power of the involved techniques. So clean up your analytics is more than ever a critical issue and this, regardless the popularity, size or seniority of your website. Referrer spams can affect barely created websites well before they are widely known.
In fact, the more your site is small and unpopular, the greater the impact of referral spam will be significant in your metrics. Whereas if you run a large website with tens of thousands visitors each day, fake referral links will be offseted by your real backlinks data. But in all cases, you shoukd know their impact is not to be overlooked.
They skew your analytics in several and five siginficant ways:
1. They decrease the accuracy of your data
2. They drag down your engagement rate
3. They diminish your quality traffic
4. They eleveta bounce rate (up to 100%)
5. They reduce the average time-on-page (close to 1.0) and session duration (close to 0.00)
In other words, referrer spam gives you a false impression of success while degrading the rest of your most qualified and useful data. Thankfully, solutions allow you to ignore referral spams and ghost referrer spam, and even restore your previous data integrity.
How to stop bots traffic in your Google Analytics data?
How to deal with referrer spam on your Google Analytics reports? There are many different techniques available. Here is a quick review of the the most common of them. And how they can be effective or not.
Filter on the Referral field
A common recommandation to prevent referrer spam and ghost referral spams in Google Analytics is to create a filter based on the Referral field
The purpose of the spammers is two fold. They attempt to improve their own page ranking within a given index, Additionally, they try to generate more web revenue by tricking webmarketers into visiting the malicious websites reported as referrers in their analytics.
How Referrer Spam Data Affects your Analytics?
The number of complaints about referrer spams has recently increased
exponentially and there is a growing concern about their evolution.
As a result, cleaning up your analytics is more critical than ever regardless of the popularity, size or seniority of your website.
Referrer spams can affect nascent websites long before becoming established..
In fact, the smaller your current website the more prone it is to be affected negatively. However any unprotected website is at risk
Referrer Spam Skews Your Analytics in Several Ways:
1. They decrease the accuracy of your data
2. They drag down your engagement rate
3. They diminish the quality of your web traffic
4. They artificially elevate your bounce rate (up to 100%)
5. They significantly reduce the average time on page and session
duration times effectively burying your site far below its deserved place.
In other words, referrer spam gives you a false impression of success and the public a false impression of mediocrity while degrading your most qualified and useful data.
Thankfully, there are solutions that allow you to ignore referral spams and
restore your previous data integrity.
How to Stop Bot Traffic Interfering with your Google Analytics Data?
How to deal with referrer spam on your Google Analytics reports?
There are many different techniques available. Here is a quick review of the the most common ones.
And how they can be effective or not.
Filter on the Referral field
A common recommandation to prevent referrer spam and ghost referral
spams in Google Analytics is to create a filter based on the Referral field
critera. It sounds logical and easy. But precisely too easy! In fact, this
Is there a moral to this bots story? Block referrer spams, especially in their
ghost referral spams mutation is time and effort consuming but this is a
crucial issue if you want to carry out your marketing goals.
Why not request a free demo
Translation - English The Rise of Referrer Spam in your Analytics
Referrer spam is distorting your Google Analytics Reports interpretation.
Have you recently noticed anomalies in your Google Analytics reports. The culprit is likely malicious referrer spam which will skew your web analysis results. Ultimately, they will render your analysis unreliable. Unreliable data is often more damaging than no data at all.
Take back control of your web analytics by learning to block referrer spam.
Bots or Humans: Who Runs the Web?
If you monitor your website analytics, you probably have recently seen an
increase in visits. While this is typically a cause for celebration, unfortunately
you have to be suspicious. Are these visits by potential clients or by robots?
Not all bots are bad and they represent up to 50% of web traffic. Some of them even improve our user experience on the web. The best example is Googlebot which indexes
contents of web pages quickly and accurately.
But other kinds of bots do not have such good intentions. They execute
malicious functions and cause confusion for the web analytics reporting system.
Recently, Google Trends showed an exponential increase of malicious bot activity
involving the various forms of referral spam. Referral spam is continuously evolving. Ghost Referral spam is even more insidious.
The xxxxx Development team can ensure your web analytics operate at peak efficiency.
Clean data is essential. Garbage in, garbage out. A key objective is to ensure your web analytics provide an accurate snapshot of web traffic trends and a remain a reliable forecasting tool.
But What is Referrer Spam? What Are They Doing? How to block them?
It is essential you know these answers to preserve the validity of your performance indicators and reach your marketing potential.
Referrer spam and ghost referral spam are the most disturbing bots in your analytics.
Referrer spam is also known as referral spam and is a specific form of spamdexing, which means spamming aimed at search engine queries.
They represent an insidious and expanding trend that artificially and deviously inflates the number of visits on a website from a referred source.
The purpose of the spammers is two fold. They attempt to improve their own page ranking within a given index, Additionally, they try to generate more web revenue by tricking webmarketers into visiting the malicious websites reported as referrers in their analytics.
How Referrer Spam Data Affects your Analytics?
The number of complaints about referrer spams has recently increased
exponentially and there is a growing concern about their evolution.
As a result, cleaning up your analytics is more critical than ever regardless of the popularity, size or seniority of your website.
Referrer spams can affect nascent websites long before becoming established..
In fact, the smaller your current website the more prone it is to be affected negatively. However any unprotected website is at risk
Referrer Spam Skews Your Analytics in Several Ways:
1. They decrease the accuracy of your data
2. They drag down your engagement rate
3. They diminish the quality of your web traffic
4. They artificially elevate your bounce rate (up to 100%)
5. They significantly reduce the average time on page and session
duration times effectively burying your site far below its deserved place.
In other words, referrer spam gives you a false impression of success and the public a false impression of mediocrity while degrading your most qualified and useful data.
Thankfully, there are solutions that allow you to ignore referral spams and
restore your previous data integrity.
How to Stop Bot Traffic Interfering with your Google Analytics Data?
How to deal with referrer spam on your Google Analytics reports?
There are many different techniques available. Here is a quick review of the the most common ones.
Filter on the Referral field
A common recommendation for preventing referrer spam from infiltrating Google Analytics is to create a filter based on Referral Field criteria. It sounds logical and easy. But it is precisely too easy! In fact, this approach is ineffective because spammers regularly change the referrals they use. This would require you to constantly update your filter which only allows you to plug the holes.
Some people recommend using a filter based on the Campaign Source Field, which is as easily exploited as the preceding example.
Filter on the Hostname field
Another approach is to set a filter based on the Hostname Field. But spammers can send fake data without targeting any identified website hostname correlated to a Google Analytics property ID.
So by creating a whitelist based only on the hostname field, you run the risk of
accidentally filtering out valid page views. Embarrassing! The opportunity cost is expensive.
Filter on Request URI field
This is a more deductive technique based on the assumption that ghost
referral spam request website homepages. So the solution is to override the
reported homepage URI (/) in the Google Analytics Javascript snippet with
an alternative such as /index.php.
In this way, you can safely ignore referrer spam by creating a filter that excludes all page views with the Request URI field set to /.
The main issue with this approach is it will introduce discontinuity into your homepage data.
To solve this you can run another filter to remap automatically /index.php to / in all your analytics.
Custom Dimension
Custom Dimension is a potential option in case spammers start targeting other
pages than /. This technique aims to change the tracking code to prevent
this specific behaviour and send a correlated and filterable value to Google
Analytics in all page views. But even that approach is not entirely safe and
sustainable.
Invest in Cleaner Analytics Data to Block Referrer Spam.
The xxxxx Development Team has implemented powerful security measures in our analytics tools.
This is quite unclear!
(Our technology is not (or less) affected than others by the issue as referrer spams often target
specific providers such as Google Analytics making our own analytics uniquely valuable because it is naturally immune. But it is also the result of hard work.
Our proprietary technology is attacked as often as others' but as referrer spam often targets
specific providers such as Google Analytics our own analytics become extremely valuable as it is immune.
Put a Spoke in the Wheels of Malicious Bots is Our Credo.
We have set up protection to filter IPs from well known or live detected bot referral
spam. We check and filter all data and we also ensure that the domain and
ID fit well to prevent malicious behaviours.
Contrary to Google Analytics, it is impossible to parse ID with the xxxxx solution, which makes referrer spam traffic more difficult or impossible to implement in bulk activities.
Our existing clientele report observing significant improvement in the quality of their key data. We have already compared their Google Analytics reports with our xxxxx optimized data:
Some of the statistics are clearly more qualified and realistic, particularly in terms of bounce rate, sessions time and number of visits .
Is there a moral to this story? Blocking referrer spam, especially in their more evolved iterations (i.e ghost referrer spams) is time consuming but essential.
Why Not Request a Free Demo of Our Referrer Spam (and Referrer Ghost spam) Blockers?
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