Analytics Spam and Spam Proofing

Name: Analytics Spam and Spam Proofing
Author: Christopher Pittman

Continue your analytical tracking journey with this intermediate course

Preview the first lesson free — get full access to all 3 lessons.

Course: On-Demand

Okay, in this video, we're gonna talk about spam to our website, how to spot it, how to look for it, how to set up a monitoring for it. Google does try, especially when we're doing paid ads, they do try to monitor spam traffic, but it always good practice to set up a way to monitor your traffic for spam within Google Analytics. So we're gonna go ahead and discuss that, discuss what spam looks like, and how to spot it within our accounts, and then how to remove some common sources from our Google Analytics account. Now in the Google Analytics AU accounts, we'd go to admin, filter, settings, and then click, under filters and settings, we would go to click known bots, and it'd have a button for us. Google automatically includes that filter known bots within Google Analytics 4, so it does make that a little bit easier in that we don't have to do that. Now, let's look at what I've set here, which is an exclude internal traffic, and how we do that. But we'll also look at how to monitor an account within the Explorer setup. It's kind of a custom setup under user explorer to be able to spot and monitor for spam traffic within our website and within our analytics account. So with that, let's go ahead and get started. Often, the most common sources of spam within any analytics account, one's going to be your internal traffic, which we're gonna filter out. And then second, it's going to be bot traffic, that basically is scraping your website for phone numbers, emails, contacts, that kind of thing. Typically, how to spot kind of spam traffic is that they're going to have an engagement time of less than two seconds. Oftentime, two seconds is below the load speed of the website. Even if your website's super fast, below an 1/8 of a second, even if your website's super fast, below 1/8 of a second in onsite time or engagement time is most likely a bot. Often, we'll see with bot traffic that it's 0.00000 seconds, and that's clearly bot traffic, so, oftentimes, that'll be filtered out. We'll look at referral traffic, how to filter out unwanted referrals too. So, we'll do quite a bit within the next two videos.

Intermediate Provider : Christopher Pittman 3 Lessons · 17m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Urdu, Chinese

Course Description

This Module of videos is devoted to spam and bot traffic detection, filtering in GA4, and recognizing the difference between bot traffic and internal users. This section will provide options for monitoring and dealing with the traffic that can falsely skew reporting data.

What You'll Learn

Identify the most common sources of spam and bot traffic
Check whether your account is being affected by spam or bot traffic
Filter or block unwanted traffic in GA4
Distinguish bot traffic from internal users
Monitor traffic that can falsely skew reporting data

Key Takeaways

The module focuses on detecting spam and bot traffic and filtering it in GA4.
Recognizing the difference between bot traffic and internal users is part of keeping reporting accurate.
Spam and bot traffic can falsely skew reporting data, so monitoring and filtering options are provided.
The course covers understanding, finding and monitoring, and minimizing website spam.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does this module cover?

It is devoted to spam and bot traffic detection, filtering in GA4, and recognizing the difference between bot traffic and internal users, including options for monitoring and dealing with traffic that can falsely skew reporting data.

What will I learn about spam and bot traffic?

You will learn the most common sources of spam and bot traffic, how to check if your account is being affected by them, and how to filter or block unwanted traffic in GA4.

What lessons are included?

The lessons are Understanding Website Spam, Finding and Monitoring Website Spam, and Minimizing Website Spam.

What skills does this course build?

It builds skills in Anti-Spam Techniques, Category Analytics, Google Analytics, Traffic Analysis, Traffic Classification, and Video Analytics.

What format is the course in?

The module is delivered as a set of videos.