How to Remove Referral Spam in Your Google Analytics

The other day, I was checking out a friend’s website.

I was poking around in his Analytics, trying to come up with some actionable insights for him to work on.

I saw a number that was super exciting. His referral traffic was through the roof! 

Referral traffic can be super valuable. I had plans for how he could turn his referral traffic into insane revenue.

Until I started digging deeper. The referral traffic was 85% spam!!

Sometimes, owning a website means riding an emotional roller coaster.

You’ll take a look at your Google Analytics (GA) and see that you’re getting lots of referral traffic, like my buddy’s website.

That’s exciting! Right?

Unfortunately, if you dig deeper, you’ll probably find out that a lot of that referral traffic is nothing but spam.

This is exactly what was happening to my friend’s site.

Referral spam (or referrer spam) is a pain in the butt for site owners around the world.

It makes it look like you have more hits than you do and it can throw off your entire marketing strategy if you’re unaware of it.

Yes, it’s that bad!

If you’ve been seeing some traffic from odd sites that you don’t recognize, it’s most likely spam.

Don’t worry. You’re not the victim of some malicious hacker. In fact, it happens to almost every site on the web.

Thankfully, there’s a fix.

Once you take the steps to eliminate the spam infecting your site, your analytics will reflect your actual traffic and you’ll be able to count on the numbers.

Plus, you’ll be better able to make informed marketing decisions.

Unfortunately, most marketers and site owners don’t even know how to recognize spam.

That’s not anyone’s fault! Some spammers are so crafty that fake visits will appear perfectly legitimate.

First, let’s talk about how to identify spam.

Then, I’ll show you exactly how to spam-proof your GA and prevent it from happening again [click to continue reading...]