
Ask HN: Google Analytics spam out of control, looking for an alternative - tangue
Month after month Google Analytics spam is getting bigger and I don&#x27;t want to spend time fighting it. I&#x27;m looking for an alternative that can support campaign tracking and conversion analysis.<p>People often talk about Piwik but I&#x27;m a bit reluctant to add PHP to the stack.<p>So, what do you use for website analytics ?
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emilburzo

        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.

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

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nodesocket
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?

~~~
tangue
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.

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ticoombs
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...](https://blog.slowb.ro/programmatic-blocking-referrer-spam-part-2-the-
correct-way-for-seo-companies/)

------
siquick
This solves it (for now anyway)

[https://www.ohow.co/ultimate-guide-to-removing-irrelevant-
tr...](https://www.ohow.co/ultimate-guide-to-removing-irrelevant-traffic-in-
google-
analytics/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=OhowSocial)

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

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

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

~~~
shaunpud
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...](https://www.google.com.au/search?q=inurl%3Astats+inurl%3Adashboard+site%3Aw3counter.com)

~~~
jazoom
It does look very clean. Thanks.

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laurent_malka
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

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stevekemp
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.)

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

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xorcist
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.

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mahir8987
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??

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mattbgates
Open Web Analytics

