I found a website that explained it all in detail and which gave in-depth step-by-step instructions on how to stop it.

In this website I learned that there were two kinds of spam that one needed to be aware of - ghost spam and crawler spam. And the author explains that ghost spam is the hardest to stop because it is the most aggressive and doesn’t leave a trace of any kind, hence, the term “ghost”. Also, it can attack all the categories of your traffic not just the Referrals section.

So in this tutorial I have skimmed through the instructions to walk you through the main steps of how to get rid of both kinds of spam by creating two separate filters in Google Analytics.

You will need to cross reference the website to see which kind of spam you have and I will be providing that link shortly.

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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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