This analytics spam is getting out of hand

Agreed, you get excited that you've got a new source of traffic and it ends up being spam.
 
A long time ago I was convinced of switching to Piwik to get off of Google and self-host my data. You never have a problem with analytics spam that way.
 
Set up a filter in Google Analytics that only includes your known hostname. The latest wave of referral spam can use your hostname as "example.com" (without the www) so if you have your site resides only on the www version, you can create a hostname filter for "www.example.com". Note: this probably will cause issues if you are also using the same tracking script on a sub domain.
 
GrandMaster said:
A long time ago I was convinced of switching to Piwik to get off of Google and self-host my data. You never have a problem with analytics spam that way.
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i love piwik. i haven't figured out how to dial in as much like i can with GA but overall it give a great picture of your traffic. plus you can get detail down to the visitors IP - this is useful if you are pairing with mautic to track behavior of traffic and potential leads.
 
coopreme said:
you can get detail down to the visitors IP - this is useful if you are pairing with mautic to track behavior of traffic and potential leads.
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That's really cool. Would it be unreasonable to run piwik and GA at the same time?
 
Yes, as good a time as many to switch to some other provider, since GA essentially has fucked webmasters over with their not-provided bs. Only issue is that most buyers of sites want GA data not from some other party.
 
ragnar said:
Yes, as good a time as many to switch to some other provider, since GA essentially has fucked webmasters over with their not-provided bs. Only issue is that most buyers of sites want GA data not from some other party.
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The not provided issue isn't with GA, it's with Google encrypting their searches. Bing and Yahoo have also done the same thing. Unfortunately switching providers wouldn't resolve that. There are some clever ways you can use search console to fill in the blanks though.
 
ryandiscord said:
The not provided issue isn't with GA, it's with Google encrypting their searches. Bing and Yahoo have also done the same thing. Unfortunately switching providers wouldn't resolve that. There are some clever ways you can use search console to fill in the blanks though.
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True, but then you wouldn't support the company which made these changes. They don't even bother doing anything about referral spam.
 
ragnar said:
True, but then you wouldn't support the company which made these changes. They don't even bother doing anything about referral spam.
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True, fair enough. You would think at the very least they would want to fix the ghost referral caused by an exploit in their own system.
 
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