It would seem that the value of having Google Analytics on a website is diminishing. Prior to 6 months ago, the statistics made some sense. Now I see wild peaks in the statistics. The problem is being caused by something called Referrer Spam. This comment which I have taken from a support board for Google Analytics says it all:
“CarolleM said:
I appreciate your feedback AnalyticsEdge…I’ve been here before. So here’s my thoughts on the situation.I know that we (the general WE) have seen this type of activity before with Semalt, dorador, alibabaexpress, iloveitaly and the list goes on. Here’s my point – we manage multiple websites and use GA as a means to measure whether our marketing initiatives increase awareness, traffic, conversions, funnel as intended, etc. These pings screw up numbers enough to effect reporting to the client. We are now in a position that we need to explain crawling, bots and pings to our clients who may be suspicious of the validity of the system to begin. Once again, this type of activity makes it difficult to track KPIs without this additional static. Since most clients are unfamiliar with reading these types of stats, we provide our clients with reports and explanations that they can appreciate and understand. With these bogus hits skewing the numbers (and I see this only getting worse) it feels more like selling snake oil than proving ROI.
Google if you want people to continue using your product as a means to substantiate website traffic, analyze visitor behaviour, track marketing initiatives, and all the other goodies you can do with this tool, then help us get clean output!!!! And if you look after numerous properties, as I do, it would be helpful to be able to batch these functions rather than spending a day on creating filters for each and every property individually – that is a total productivity killer. Can anybody explain why we need to put up with this type of spam? Or can we insist that GA find a proper fix?”
What can you do?
The author of this post is a marketing professional who uses Google Analytics to prove ROI (Return on Investment) to her clients, it is part of her business. In our case we use it as a guide to find out who is looking at what, and how many hits we are getting.
Right now without spending a lot of time figuring out how to apply filters to GA I don’t have a solution. It looks to be pretty time consuming. I recommend that you do not take the top level numbers of site visits as gospel. Assume that the information is distorted by referrer spam and other non human initiated traffic (Bots). To find out how many people visited your site over a period of time, go to the Geo and location options in GA and click on the UK. For the majority of my client base you would only be interested in visitors from the UK anyway. This is the best “quick” way to find out what is real.
If you do have time to look at the more detailed stats, a visitor that has been on your site for 0 seconds was never there. This is the problem she is referring to.