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Ask HN: Google Analytics spam out of control, looking for an alternative

38 pointstangue24 comments

Month after month Google Analytics spam is getting bigger and I don't want to spend time fighting it. I'm looking for an alternative that can support campaign tracking and conversion analysis.

People often talk about Piwik but I'm a bit reluctant to add PHP to the stack.

So, what do you use for website analytics ?

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    Admin -> Account -> Property -> View -> View Settings
    
    [ ] Bot Filtering
    
    Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders

It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing.

Note: Enabling it doesn't work retroactively, just from that point forward.

Thank you! I think I understand why they couldn't enable this by default, but I really wish they had.

Unfortunately this doesn't block Vitaly and all of the spam from him/her.

Oh hell yes! Thanks for this!

I know we're all excited with how popular our websites are in Moscow but it gets annoying very fast.

This is awesome. Really wish it worked retroactively though....

This is already checked since a long time and it doesn't work. The workarounds explained in siquick post below seems to eliminate most spam.

Note: Enabling it doesn't work at all.

It's like pushing the button at a crosswalk.

I have had this enabled for a few months (basically as soon as I discovered it). The problem is that it seems to be working off of a static list of bots that is updated at intervals. Kind of like the need to update virus definitions on your AV software way back in the day. The end result of this is that instead of seeing referrals from "share.button.to" and the like, I still see them, just under a different name.

I've also gotten absolutely swamped in Google Analytics with things like:

Language:

  Secret.ɢoogle.com You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump!
  o-o-8-o-o.com search shell is much better than google!
  Vitaly rules google *:｡゜ﾟ･*ヽ(^ᴗ^)ﾉ*･゜ﾟ｡:* ¯\_(ツ)_/¯(ಠ益ಠ)(ಥ‿ಥ)(ʘ‿ʘ)ლ(ಠ_ಠლ)( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ヽ(ﾟДﾟ)ﾉʕ•̫͡•ʔᶘ ᵒᴥᵒᶅ(=^ ^=)oO
  Google officially recommends o-o-8-o-o.com search shell!

Google Analytics needs to address this. What can we do to prevent this type of spam?

Yes I'm talking about this, fake lifehacker and reddit posts and referers like "Secret.ɢoogle.com You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump!"

Since two months my analytics are useless. I spent a lot of time configuring filters against older spammers (like darodar or IloveItaly) and I don't wan't to do it every three months or so.

It's a bit strange that spam is a solved problem in Gmail and that Google can't address it properly in Analytics.

I wrote a blog post [0] on using the API for Google analytics to create a filter to block most of the referrer spam.

tl;dr for the post is: You setup 2 filters one for the hostname, and one for the language. (The language part is not added yet I'm still writing that update, this is a new spam technique in the last couple months where the data is coming out of Russia)

You then have to create a referrer blocker on your webserver which returns 444 if the referrer contains (list if sites).

I also use piwik personally and have found it's definately lacking compared to GA in what you can do but it is quite adequate for my own personal blog/projects.

Piwik can do campaign, goal and event tracking. Which sounds like it has what you want. You could go for the hosted version and pay X amount if you want someone else to worry about it.

[0] https://blog.slowb.ro/programmatic-blocking-referrer-spam-pa...

This solves it (for now anyway)

https://www.ohow.co/ultimate-guide-to-removing-irrelevant-tr...

Thanks @siquick for anyone reading this post and looking for a solution : it works.

I gave up last month. Using free tier at W3Counter and pretty impressed; https://www.w3counter.com

Thanks for your input. May I ask what about it impressed you?

Not the answer to your question, but tangentially related: it is ran by a HN solo founder; @dangrossman.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367631

I looked at a number of other sites using it [0] and found it was very easy to use. I don't go too far into things though, just really interested in hits, uniq, referers etc.

[0] https://www.google.com.au/search?q=inurl%3Astats+inurl%3Adas...

It does look very clean. Thanks.

Campaign/conversion tracking isn't quite similar to web analytics.

1. web analytics capture everything/anything hitting your site and only filters which should be constantly updated should allow you to visualise/read your data. Surely, you have in GA and most other analytics platform a section where you'll identify your campaigns performances, but that's about it.

2. Campaign/conversion tracking from a marketing perspective starts from the campaign management, which itself starts with a campaign link. A campaign link is by definition a unique link which will redirect to your site/landing page. This link shouldn't be discoverable/indexed by search engines, and consequently only hits coming from the actual campaign URL, are counted. Tracking/campaign management platforms - unlike google analytics - provide specific rules/geotarget/redirect etc.. which allow to build funnels and marketing flows, while url's with utm parameters are static url's which load a page, which can be responsive or not.

Google analytics is a very powerful platform which should provide very granular insights on how your site/business is doing. But those analytics should be used from a very high level perspective as they take into account the entire traffic flow.

But campaigns are different. They are keyword, country, language, device specific and frankly, after running thousands of campaigns one will realize that general trends can be identified through google analytics, but campaigns themselves are generally speaking fairly different one from an other. Which is why a separate software should be used to run/analyze the campaign's performances.

I know you wanted a different answer, but I'm seeing more and more companies/agencies shifting their workflows to address more accurately their campaign performances via campaign management platforms rather than their Google Analytics.

I hope that helped anyway.

disclosure: i run trackingdesk

Even if you host your own Piwik instance you'll see these results; they're coming as referer-spam, or as user-agent strings.

It's frustrating, but it isn't a problem you can avoid by changing analytic-provider. (Although some might allow you to blacklist/ignore some particular terms.)

Piwik has its own updatable referrer spam blocklist. So you should get near 0 referrer spam

Don't be reluctant because of PHP. It's going to be hard to completely avoid, and the upside is that it's a rather mature platform. Piwik works fine in a read only chroot (FPM brings this to PHP).

As a product, Piwik is excellent. It won't give you target audiences that GA can, since it doesn't have Google's knowledge behind it, but the core product is solid. You can track campaigns and events and there are decent report and alerting engines.

I have exacts problem as nodesocket in language section of analytics, right now solve through filter and view setting, but need permanents solution, can anyone have??

Open Web Analytics

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