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Comment by radium3d | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how these alternative options (countly, matomo, snowplow, etc) handle fake referral traffic compared to how Google analytics handles it.

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Has Google Analytics finally begun blocking referrer spam? I know Piwik/Matomo have been doing this by default for a while: https://matomo.org/blog/2015/05/stopping-referrer-spam/

The blacklist is on GitHub and is useful for other analytics software, such as GoAccess which is what I use.

Not well! Your best bet is to

  * Sync your (snowplow, segment, ...) data to a data warehouse
  * Try to clean up your data with SQL
  * Keep running GA so you can compare your numbers to GA

That may be a helpful open source machine learning project for a self-hosted analytics system perhaps.

That's exactly what we do. Snowplow does a good job, but having the comparison points in GA is very helpful.

Matomo uses a simple community-contributed list [1] of domains that were reported by multiple people to create referrer-spam.

Of course you can use the same list for every other software.

[1] https://github.com/matomo-org/referrer-spam-blacklist/blob/m...

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