The most amazing thing about Digital marketing analytics is that they can be as simple or as complicated as you want them to be. Understanding them and more importantly utilizing them for your benefit is really necessary if you want to carve out a niche for yourself in the marketing arena. Digital marketing is truly dynamic as there are numerous factors to be considered to track digital marketing analytics. Other media marketing modes such as newspaper, magazines, radio, TV etc. are static and do not pose a challenge as far as understanding patterns or tracking is considered. With Digital marketing we can track who watched our post, how did they respond, what kind of audience did it attract, even how many times did they see it etc. which implies a whole new level of marketing standards. The kind of device the user saw the post on is visible to the marketers as well. In some cases their age, interests, location, previous buying behaviour etc. is also available. This allows the marketers to better understand the client behaviour. We are literally putting ourselves out there in the hands of marketers. But what happens when it haunts you, becoming more of a headache than an opportunity?When somebody visits your website their browser passes certain information and data into Google analytics. One piece of information that is passed is called the referral. The referrer is the site that the users are on when they click the link to go to your website. The exploit comes from the fact that the browser is responsible for passing the data. If you can program your own browser, you can pass on anything as the referrer. Spammers do this to grab your attention. When you see a lot of traffic coming from a single site then you might go and take a look at that site. When you do that, you might get a sales pitch or you might see an ad that is going to follow you around for weeks. Another problem with referral spam traffic is that you don’t get to see the real picture. There are accounts where 70% of the traffic is made up of referral spam. You might feel happy that your website traffic is growing steadily but the reality is haunting, as these are all referral spams. These activities are not coming from real people coming to your site. Ghost visits are also on the rise as one of the main culprits for your site. They corrupt your data way more than referral spam.
Ghost visits show up as real visits in your analytics report. But in reality nobody ever showed up. Unlike referral spam, which fakes a source but could still mean that the visitor on your website was a bot, ghost visits consist of no visits whatsoever. It only looks like that there was a visit. How does it happen, one might wonder.
You paste a Google analytics code in your site. The only difference in different codes is the tracking id number. If some other user changes their tracking ID to match yours, then suddenly all of their traffic shows up in your analytics report, even though the visits were on their website. Now why would anyone want to do that? If somebody wants to inject some data into thousands of Google analytics account, to draw attention to their own business, then they could set up a private web server, put in the Google analytics code and then randomly change the tracking id number with each visit. They will be able to make a big impression across many different businesses in a really short span of time. Let’s see how to eliminate these kind of false visits.
- Include filter – When you log in to your analytics account, audience overview section, click on technology, network and then host name. Now here you should not see any other domain apart from your own domain name. Any other domain names are ghost visits. Since the spammers pick random tracking id numbers, they have no idea which system they are targeting. All you need to do is set up a filter in your analytics account so as not to allow any other host names in this list. First create a new view and set up the filter in that view so as to keep your data safe. Under this view, click on filter, then add filter option. Give the filter an appropriate name. Click on custom, then click on include. Select host name from the filter field drop down box. Write your domain name in the filter pattern. Click on verify filter option and you’ll see a list of host names that are not going to be considered into your account. Thereafter click on Save and you are good to go. Now this filter removes mostly all of the ghost visits that were making up false analytics reports. But we still have referral spam to deal with.
- Source filter – Under acquisition, click on all traffic, then on referrals option. Now you’ll see a list of hostnames sending false visits to your account. Here bot visits will still get recorded as they are actual visits to your site even though they come from a bot. You could put in advance filter here to see the traffic from your real hostname. Choose include option, then hostname, exactly matching option and then pick your domain name. Click on apply to see the changes.
- You can also create an exclude filter if you want to remove a specific domain name from your analytics account.
- Language filter – it can be used to clean up the data space that we have stored inside the language report.
- Enable bot filtering – this option can be set inside the reporting view.
- The Black box solution – the easiest solution to keep false traffic out of your analytics report is this filter provided by Google. It can be set by going into the view settings and check the box that says to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders.