There is nothing more exciting for a website owner than seeing a steady increase in traffic. It signifies healthy growth. Traffic spikes, however, should be viewed with caution. While it’s not uncommon for a website to experience a burst of visitors, if you open your website analytics and see odd traffic, then it could be spam.
Spam traffic happens to all websites, which is why it’s vital to know how to identify, block, and report it. In this article, we’ll go over everything you need to handle it.
What is website spamming?
At its core, website spamming refers to any site traffic that’s fake or low-quality. It’s typically generated by bots, scripts, or other automated tools rather than by real people.
Precisely because it’s not real people, such traffic does very little, if anything, for the growth of your site. It doesn’t browse your content, fill out forms, or make purchases. Instead it:
Promotes spammy or malicious sites.
Manipulates traffic statistics.
Tricks site owners into clicking suspicious links.
All of that affects the data you see. Useless traffic can skew website metrics, leading to suboptimal decision-making and poor results.
Both SEO and customer experience will suffer as a result. For example:
Performance uncertainty: Spam traffic masks your site’s actual performance, blinding you to which SEO initiatives work and which don’t. Not to mention it eliminates any chance of accurate forecasting.
Wrong content prioritization: Since bots can interact with your content, they can lead you astray. A piece of content can seemingly be doing really well, when your real users prefer something else.
Misguided user experience changes: Additionally, any user experience optimizations you make may be pointless. You could be misled into making changes to your checkout experience when your navigation is suffering.
A/B tests failing: A/B testing is all about experimentation. However, you don’t want data from a bot. The “winning” variant you chose based on spam traffic could be the exact opposite of what you need.
Credibility goes out the window: Finally, any reporting credibility is gone. Showing a traffic growth when half of it is bots doesn’t look good at all.
As you can see, it’s not great to leave spam traffic unfiltered in your analytics. It skews things immensely and can cause actual damage to your site’s performance. Before we show you how to get rid of it, though, let’s take a look at the most common types of spam traffic so you can identify it first.
Types of spam traffic and identifying it
Fortunately, most types of spam traffic are clearly documented and well-understood. Since such traffic is commonplace nowadays, its sources are easy to identify. Here are the ones you are most likely to encounter.
Bot traffic: These are automated scripts that crawl your site (similar to search engine crawlers) to scrape your content, gather information for competitors, etc. Fortunately, many analytics tools can spot them, but some can masquerade as legit users.
Referral spam: Also known as referral junk, this traffic comes from suspicious websites. They try to bait you into going to the website instead.
Ghost traffic: As the name suggests, this type of traffic sends fake data directly to your analytics ID without ever visiting your site.
Faked organic sessions: Finally, these appear to be actual search engine visits but are in fact bots spoofing user agents.
Those are the most common variations of spam traffic that you’ll encounter. They all come with big red flags that are easy to spot if you know what to look for in your analytics: red flags related to behavior and source-level red flags.
Behavioral red flags
These are the easiest to identify. They are consistent, obvious, and you’ll learn to recognise them very quickly when you get used to their characteristics. Here’s what to look for.
Zero-second engagement: Most people will spend some time on your site before closing it. As a result, engagements with session times of 0 seconds are typically a sign of spam.
Sessions that are too similar: If you notice engagement that’s far too consistent (when it happens, how long it lasts, and how many visitors it is), then keep an eye on it. It’s likely spam since bots usually run on a schedule.
Too many single-page visits: There’s nothing wrong with someone visiting one page and then leaving. What you should be wary of is when it happens too often on the same page and with the same actions.
Sudden traffic spikes: Traffic spikes are a natural part of every website’s growth. However, when your site suddenly experiences an influx of traffic for no apparent reason, from a single source at an odd time, investigate immediately.
These red flags are apparent once you know they exist. Fortunately, the other set of red flags is even easier to catch.
Source-level red flags
Source-level red flags concern the origin of the spam traffic. These are the ones you will most likely see.
Unexpected countries: The most obvious sign of spam is receiving high traffic from a country you have no reason to. Whether you don’t serve it, don’t advertise in it, or have no audience there, a spike usually means spam.
Device and browser combinations: If you see Internet Explorer on a Mac, that’s definitely spam. Such impossible combinations between browser and OS, or even versions that don’t exist or are too old to work with each other, are an instant red flag.
Suspicious domains: Look out for domains that lead to gambling or adult sites, have strange strings in them, or are obviously trying to get you to click (boost-your-traffic.xyz).
Invalid UTM parameters: The last one involves campaign parameters that don’t make sense, whether it’s gibberish values or UTMs that don’t match your campaigns.
And there you have it. Use this list of concise red flags to identify, block, and report any spam traffic that comes your way. Speaking of which, here’s how you can do that.
How to block and report spam traffic via Google Analytics 4
When it comes to blocking spam traffic, there is no silver bullet. Instead, there are many small, quick things you can implement to support long-term efforts to keep your analytics clean.
We’ll focus on Google Analytics 4 (GA4), as that’s the one most people use, but what we describe in this section should still have value if you are using a different platform.
How to block spam traffic in GA4
When it comes to blocking spam traffic, there’s one essential thing to remember. You want to remove fake traffic without harming the analytics you get from legitimate users. GA4 has several tools that will help you immensely with that.
Built-in bot filtering: GA4 automatically excludes many known bots and crawlers. Google already did the first step to blocking spam traffic for you. It won’t stop everything, but it’s a solid baseline.
Create filters: You can create all sorts of filters in GA4 that will weed out unwanted traffic from your analytics. After you’ve identified the sources of spam, you can easily create a filter that stops them from showing up in your reports.
Block unwanted referrals: Another option is to create an exclusion list of known spam sources. Just ensure you keep it up to date, as new spam referral domains keep popping up.
Cloudflare: Cloudflare can be invaluable for limiting spam on your site. It stops bots before they even hit your site.
You can create rules that stop traffic that doesn’t match their parameters.
It can limit the rate at which traffic from a single source hits your site.
Finally, it also has JavaScript challenges that simple spambots can’t handle, and you can set up GA4 to register traffic only from sources that pass.
These methods will lay a solid foundation for your bot-blocking needs. However, this is a task that needs your attention. Keep an eye on your filters and exclusion lists, and ensure your Cloudflare rules are up to date, and you’ll see how the spam gradually goes away.
How to report spam traffic in GA4
Finally, to round out this blog post, we’ll show you how to report sources of spam. It’s very easy with Google’s report form.
Simply open the Google report page and select what you want to report: spam, malware, or phishing. That will take you to the appropriate form, where you can enter the offender's URL and select the type of spam.
That’s it. However, we should mention that reporting is merely a supporting step and not part of the spam filtering process itself. It’s a way to make the Internet a better place by pointing out spammy sites to Google.
Don’t let traffic spam ruin your analytics
Spam traffic is a frustrating but common issue, especially for websites without filtering rules. The good news is that it rarely affects the website itself.
So, don’t let unwanted traffic ruin your analytics and mislead you into making changes your site doesn’t need. Leverage GA4 to filter out the spam so you can see the clear picture.
The fight against spam is a methodical process and as long as there are spammers, there will be a need for spam blocking. Keep an eye on your filters and lists, and your site will be spam-free.