It’s already been a big year for Google – from shutting down Google Compare, it’s insurance and financial comparison site to the change in it’s software after a driverless car hit a bus – but the news that everyone is getting excited about are the changes to Google’s Search Term Reports that can help you with spam.
You might be a Google Analytics pro, or maybe you dip in now and again…
Here are the need-to-know facts.
In Google Analytics there is now a set filter that can easily help you eliminate bot traffic – also known as referral spam.
The Google Analytics Search Term Report change is a brilliant way to eliminate referral spam traffic from your reporting. Referral spam skews your stats and this change tucks the known bots away from the meat of your reporting.
Picture the scene. You log onto your analytics for your brand new, 1 day old, un-marketed website. You have 1 post but haven’t done any legwork. Strangely, someone has been linking to your amazing inbound content! You see some strange names. Buttons-for-your-website is a classic. You marvel at your SEO strategy. Sadly, these referrals are spam. There is malware which is used to produce the referral name, which hits your site, and although it is done harmlessly, it leaves a 100% bounce rate and a 0 second dwell time on your Google Analytics reports.
There are also visits you will see in your search terms – anything with unusual characters usually stands out as being spammy.
This is an annoyance in the short term, and in the long term when you do start getting lots of traffic, your stats are skewed.
Previously instead of rolling out a report, you had to do a bit more investigation into what was real traffic, and what was fake. You either had to annotate your analytics manually to account for bot traffic, or you had to use the custom advanced filter to do some manual blocking, probably dragging in someone with a masters in software engineering to action all changes to web.config files. This was time consuming and not a great way to spend part of your day.
Now in order to remove bot and crawler traffic from your metrics, you need to delve into the Admin settings. This will bring up a view panel, and view settings. This now features a link to ‘Bot Filtering’. The checkbox says ‘exclude all hits from known bots.’
Selecting this means that the backend of Analytics will exclude hits matching the User Agents named in the known bots list as though they were subject to a profile filter. This will allow you to identify the real number of visitors that are coming to your site according to Google Analytics.
If you need quick fix (MD breathing over your shoulder for those site stats?) Then you can use the classic filter on Campaign Source. Just go to the Admin tab, select the View you want to filter and click on Filters and then ‘new filter’. Create a filter called ‘Spam’ and then type in a keyword associated with the spam site. If you want too double check if something is legit, then Analytics Edge have some great examples. (Just a caveat – don’t click on the spam websites.)
For people serious about analytics who thrive on perfect data, this new change is a game changer. If you want to know more about the changes, speak to us today.
