How to clean your Google Analytics data from spam traffic

Two weeks ago my first post appeared in Conversionista’s blog. The post describes how bad bot and spam traffic can affect your Google Analytics data. Did you know that about 30% of traffic to your website can come from bad bots? Bad bots are computer programs that automatically perform intentionally harmful actions on your website like serving spam or stealing content. Some of these bots actually visit your website, while others appear only in your Google Analytics data. Regardless of whether spam bots hit your server logs or not, they leave tracks in a number of GA reports. A large share of spam traffic appears in Referrals and Source/Medium reports. However, you can find spam referrals even in All pages report and among event categories. Bad bots can also leave their footprints in Technology reports.

Spam traffic is characterised by very short visits with near 100% (or 0%) bounce rate and around 100% share of new sessions. Such visits do not result in goal completions or e-commerce transactions either. Thereby spam traffic can negatively affect you key performance metrics, like session count, engagement and conversion rates. One way to get rid of the spam traffic is to check the box Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders under View settings inside the Admin section. Read the whole article here to get more tips on how to clean your Google Analytics data.

Update November 2024: Since Google Analytics has been ‘upgraded’ from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 in the recent years and does not have the same functionality for filtering away spam traffic any longer, my blog post on Conversionista’s blog became outdated and was removed. You can still access it on web.archive.org though :).