Ghost Spam in your Blogger Dashboard and Adding Google Analytics to Your Blogger Blog

As we discussed in the post about weird referrals showing up in your Google Analytics which is actually Ghost Spam, Ghost Spam is in many places including your Blogger Dashboard.

Ghost Spam doesn't hurt your site or your blog. Ghost Spam is taking advantage of backdoor tactics to show up in your reporting results.

The spammers do this because tons of people see them as a referral, get excited and click on their link to see who is doing all of this referring to your content. Well no one is. They aren't helping you get traffic. They are just showing up in reporting in the hopes that you DO click on them. You are then creating traffic for THEM when you click. 

So you have boosted THEIR traffic which they can sell and even hopefully sell YOU some SEO services (or other services) because who better to sell SEO help to than people who don't know enough about SEO to know that they are Ghost Spam?

Good news is that in most cases they do no harm to your content.

So what can you do? Even if they aren't hurting your content, they are inflating your traffic numbers and not allowing you a clean image of what your real traffic is.

1. You should hook Google Analytics up to your blog. It will give you more information that your blogger dashboard anyway. (see below)

2. You can then add a filter to your Analytics to show metrics that don't include ghost Spam. Click here to do that after you add Analytics to your Blogger Blog (or any blog).

How to add Google Analytics to your Blogger blog metrics.

1. Make sure you have an Analytics account. If you are using Blogger, then you have a Google account already. Just log in to Google Analytics. 

If you are brand new to Analytics, then click the sign up button. 

Create your new account. 

The account name should be the name of your business overall and not specific to the blog. You will have the ability to have multiple properties under each account name.

So you can have Acme Ice Cream as your account name.

Then properties under that account can be Acme Ice Cream website, blog, social, etc.

2. Set up your Blogger Blog property under the correct account name. This property should be referred to as the name of your blog.

You do this by clicking on admin, then the drop down next to properties and choose "create new".

Add the blog URL. Add the industry and time zone.

Click the Get tracking ID button. 

Read and agree (if you do agree) to the terms of service.

For Blogger you are going to copy the tracking ID only. It's the first thing in the upper left corner. You do not need the  HTML code in the box. You would use that if you were adding Analytics to your website. (see this post for that)

The code you want will look something like this UA-71111111-1

3. Then go back to your Blogger dashboard.

Click on settings, and then other. There is a place to paste your code like in the image below.

You are set. ~

As soon as you're emotionally able, you really should consider adding the filter to remove Ghost Spam from Analytics, too.

If you're only mildly geeky, setting up Analytics is enough for today.

Add a calendar reminder for 3 months from now to do the filter. Include this link in the reminder so that it's easy to find. http://howtododigital.blogspot.com/2016/02/blocking-ghost-spam-in-your-google.html

I find it easier for my clients to deal with that after they have used Analytics for awhile so they have a bit of understanding of how Analytics flows.

Well actually it's easier for them if I just do it, but that's not the point of this blog : )

Answer to - What is the referral t.co in my Blogger or Google Analytics?

Lot's of questions this week from customers asking about t.co in their Google Analytics. Great news is that t.co appearing in your referral traffic is not Ghost Spam. (Read more about Ghost Spam here).

So what is t.co? The simple and non-geeky answer is that it traffic coming from Twitter. It is a wonderful and valid source. If you're keeping it simple... you're done : )

The medium geeky answer is that in 2010, Twitter started using it's own link shortener (like bit.ly and tinyurl). So anytime that you either compose a Tweet on Twitter or click a Twitter button on a site to share content, Twitter shortens the URL using their own t.co program.

It benefits the user because shorter links use less characters. It also claims to "scan" the page that is being linked to prevent malware. Hence there is some page validation going on.

It benefits Twitter because Twitter can take advantage of the marketing information that they can garner from posts and interactions rather than letting third party apps (again like bit.ly or tinyurl) get that information. That information is gold in marketing. That's part of how url shorteners stay "free" on the web. They are gathering marketing info. Not in an evil way, mind you. They are simply measuring engagement, how a person got to the page before they clicked, how many people engage with different content etc. This information is used to help people do targeted marketing.

As a small to medium business owner, I will be encouraging you to do some targeted marketing and will show you how.

Let us know if you have any questions!
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AND Have a lovely day : )

Ghost Spam. What are these Weird Referral Sources in my Google Analytics?

This week's top client question:

What are these weird referral sources on my Google Analytics like traffic2cash.xyz and top1-seo-service.com and free-social-buttons.xyz (and on and on and on)? I am concerned because the bounce rate is very high for these? What do they mean?

Well, these sources in your Google Analytics and Blogger reports are called Ghost Spam. It is spam. They never actually hit your website. They enter into your Google Analytics through a backdoor path called Analytics Measurement Protocol which is a feature of GA intended to allow web site developers to gather and measure data. Hackers have figured out how to use it to their advantage to get into your reporting with out have your tracking code. To get your code, most probably they generate random codes with the GA pattern (UA-XXXXXX-Y) then using an automated script they send fake data directly to your reports.

Why are they doing this? Because they are using the natural curiosity of people reading their Analytics to garner traffic. Every day, hundreds, thousands maybe even tens of thousands of innocent people just like you open their Analytics in hopeful anticipation of seeing increased web traffic and learning more about their potential new clients. They go to the referral section and see tons of traffic from a "weird" URL and they click on it to see what it is. THIS MOMENT IS THE MOMENT THAT GHOST SPAMMERS WANT. Clicking on the link sends you to weird redirect pages where services are offered. Maybe it's SEO services for people who aren't sure whats happening in their Analytics. Nothing harmful actually happens (usually and yet). They are just hoping that you buy something from this redirected page and they get a cut. It's a cheap method for them to get tons of traffic. Most people don't buy, but they only need a small percentage to respond to an offer, they get their cut and move on. They don't have to invest tons of money into this Spam Scam. 

Isn't Google fixing this? Well over all - of course they are! Remember that GA is a free service and has many many many moving parts. When they make a change to one part, many other things change. Google doesn't take that lightly. So changes are thoughtfully handled with time spent measuring the ramifications of those changes. If they weren't working on it, it would a gazillion times worse.

Is it always in the referral sources? No. It's most often there, but it sometimes can appear in Organic (when you see random or nonsensical keywords), and sometimes Events (they can be tricky and say "to use this feature visit event-tracking.com").

How can I check for Ghost Spam? Follow the steps below. Everything that isn't tied directly to your domain name or to a vendor that you use for your site is most likely spam. MAKE SURE you choose a wide date range before you run this report.

And yes even Google.com is most likely spam. They use names like t"Google" because it looks popular and harmless. None of your web pages are directly on Google.com. It's not a "host" for you.

Special note... one of the most common misunderstood referrers is t.co. That one is actually good. It's Twitter! You can read more here if you wonder about that.

Ok I see it, know I have it and I understand it. What do I do about it? You have two choices. 1. (less geeky) You can adjust your reporting like we did above and disregard the bad data.

2. (more Geeky) You can apply filters to your Google Analytics that will filter out the bad data for you. This has to be done very mindfully so that you don't lose precious data. We will cover this in this blog.... Adding Filter to remove Ghost Spam metrics.

We will also be covering this for those using Blogger in the next few blogs as well.

As always, please let us know if you have any questions. You can follow us on Facebook or add your email to be notified of our new blogs.