What is Google Analytics Spam?
What Google Analytics SPAM or Web Analytics SPAM is actually, therefore we have an article in our Knowledge Base: SPAM (in Web Analytics)
Current Analytics SPAM wave in January/February 2021
Since January 31 spam traffic can be found in approx. 10% of the analytics accounts, e.g. with sources from trafficbot.life, bot-traffic.xyz and other domains (do not visit!). The domains apparently change daily. Various reports are affected:
But not only the domains, but also browsers, locations, etc. are completely different. This makes it very difficult to narrow down the current spam traffic, much to filter for. However, there is a possibility:
Real browser always send the browser size - but the currently SPAM bot does not. With this knowledge and another common bot filter, such as a visit time of 0 seconds, you can limit the current SPAM traffic quite well. Here is an example of an Analytics Segment configuration:
So you can see in this example that the current spam wave "only" took three days and now is already over:
What can be done to prevent Analytics SPAM?
There are many blog articles and help pages on the internet that describe how to fight Google Analytics SPAM. Most of them, however, are only aimed at one of the types of SPAM. As the current SPAM wave shows, this is of little use.
Since most spam attacks using the previously mentioned Measurement Protocol, there is at least on Google Analytics 4 an effective method against spam. Details on this and also on a SPAM filter for GA4 can be found in our Knowledge Base: SPAM Filter in Google Analytics 4
This method is not available for Universal Analytics, but there is an old trick that should also work against SPAM. Details are also available in our Knowledge Base: SPAM Filter in Universal Analytics