Analytics spam : “to use this feature visit: Event-Tracking.com”

If you regularly use GA event-tracking, sometimes you can find an unknown category in the event-category report :

to use this feature visit: EVENT-TRACKING.COM

You may have concern about website security, can this be somebody hacking your website’s code or it’s just a GA problem? This type of spam hits your reports without even accessing your site, it lowers the quality of your stats since it adds fake data.

The last thing you should do is to visit the referring site, since this is an invitation to get a virus or Trojan infection on your computer. I recommend you do a quick Google search first to see if you can trust it. A lot of spam referral links are intended to get you to visit the link. Sometimes they are evil destinations, and sometimes they are legitimate businesses that contracted with a shady SEO company to increase traffic. If you clicked, they get paid.

How can you get rid of this?

Trying to block it in your .htaccess won’t work as they never access your site. Using some script, they post fake pageviews to Google’s tracking service using a random series of tracking IDs. When they pick a series that includes your tracking ID, Google records a referral visit from their source in your reports. To stop Ghost Spam, you have to add a filter in Google Analytics. Ghost Referrer Spam normally shows up only for a few days and then disappear, that’s why some people think they blocked them from the .htaccess file, but is just a coincidence.

1. Go to the Admin tab in your Google Analytics account
2. Select the View you want to filter and click on  Filters    
3. Select New Filter    
4. Put as name referrer spam
5. In Filter Type choose  Custom Filter>Exclude Filter > Field: Campaign Source> Filter Pattern: Enter www.event-tracking.com
6. Once you set everything click Save. The filter is tested and works but if you want you can verify the filter and see how it will work.

Hope this post helps you to keep your analytics data clean and accurate. Spam hits thousands of people, If the article helped you, please consider sharing it or leave a comment with your experience, it may help other people too.