Having large numbers of visitors/traffic by referral spam won’t allow you to see an accurate number of visitors to your site in Google Analytics (GA). And it will cause a high Bounce rate (100%) with a 0% Avg. Session Duration which means that the referral didn’t even spend time on your website.

Having a 100% Bounce rate and 0% Avg. Session Duration I came to learn was referral spam which impacts your website adversely and impedes good ranking in google. So, it must be dealt with in order to have a healthy website and to gain googles trust.

Below I will walk you through how to access your Referrals section in GA to see which spam you currently have.

Step 1. Sign-in to your Google Analytics account.

Step 2. At the top menu click on the “Reporting” tab.

Step 3. On the left-hand side column, click on “Acquisition”, then “Overview”. You should see a pie chart divided by Organic Search, Direct, Social, & Referrals. If your “Referrals” section is a large piece of the pie then you should look into it because chances are, if you’re a new website, that this is all Referral Spam! :(

Step 4. Scroll down on the page to see all the different categories of your website traffic. You will see that they are numbered by rows. Click on the one that says “Referrals”. It will then bring you to the detailed page of all the Referrals and each of their website domains or hostnames.

Step 5. On each of these domains/hostnames check the “Bounce Rate” and “Avg. Session Duration” columns. If the Bounce Rate is 100% with a 0% Average Session Rate then it is spam. Don’t click on these websites as that is what they want you to do. They want to bring you to their fake website to sell you something or do something worse.

If you want to know what kind of website it is, just go on google and do a search on it. It will most surely come up and be confirmed as Referral Spam.

Step 6. Copy & Paste each of the Referral Spam domains/hostnames that look weird or that you don't recognize into a blank document such as in TextEdit, WordPad or MSWord.

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JKAshipala Premium
Very helpful article indeed.
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NRosales Premium
I found you and though I am not applying the training on my GA, I know for sure that it will help me, my site is almost saturated with spam. I am almost a year old in Wa, is this incident normal.
I would like to thank you for this training as I know it will help.
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Aliee Premium
@NRosales
Hi, yes my site had lots of "referral spam" on it so I wanted to find a way to get rid of it. The website I found seemed to be the best and easiest one to help me do this.

If you've never applied any filters for the spam then yes, I think that's normal. I'm glad I could help! :)
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GolfSpecialt Premium
Thanks Aliee, this was very helpful as a newbie here. One quick question? My tracking numbers look like this UA-#########-# do I just enter this exactly as it appears in the REGEX string separated by a |?
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Aliee Premium
@GolfSpecialt
Hi, sorry to get back to you so late. I've taken another hiatus and hope to be back to work here soon! The tracking number that you're talking about with the UA at the front doesn't seem to be a spam name to enter into a REGEX string. This tracking number is something else and is not what is supposed to be entered so I suggest that you don't enter that tracking number. Feel free to send me a private message if you need more info. on this.
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electrobot Premium
I stopped using GA. I found GA to have zero value to me.
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Aliee Premium
@electrobot
Really?? What are you using now to track your incoming traffic?
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electrobot Premium
@Aliee
I just roughly guage my traffic based on comments, site feedback, and email I receive. Also, I do a google search regularly to see how my posts and pages appear. I've just had way to many problems with GA. Also, studying the stats has never helped me to increase my site traffic or produce more quality content. Just my thoughts and opinions on the matter. Thanks for your informative and instructive training. :)
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Aliee Premium
@electrobot
Ok, makes sense. I mainly wanted to do this for my website because I didn't want it to interfere with getting a good ranking in google. I didn't want to have mostly spam as traffic to my site and then google think that my site was spam too, especially when you're a new site and want to make a good impression. It just makes me feel better to know that I can control it to a certain extent. Take care :)
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