If you have an existing website running and you have been tracking it for some time, then you might ask if you could filter the referrals from your historical report, the answer is yes.

Although we cannot remove the historical data, however, we could filter them by adding a new segment. The steps are

• Under Reporting, on Acquisitions > All Traffic > Referrals.
• As shown below, click the All Sessions, to show the segments.
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• Click the + NEW SEGMENT, then enter your Segment Name, for example, 0_New
• Under the Conditions, there are two conditions to add
  • Condition 1, to exclude the referral spam and bots
  • Condition 2, to include the default source or the good referrals.
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• As you can see, I am filtering out the unwanted referrals and adding in the source or referrals that I wanted to see in analytics. As this is manually done, and it might take some time. Also take note of the highlighted and follow the fields as shown, once everything is done, click Save.

Once you have filtered your IP and the referral spam and bots, the analytics data will be more accurate. Only then, you could research your visitors’ ages, demographics or behaviors. This is important as you would understand how the visitors interact with your site or landing pages, and along the way making changes to your audiences.