Ghosts of Web Traffic Present: Battling Referrer Spam

Some spammers think that by making it look like they’ve visited your site, it’ll get you to go to their site. This tactic is known as ‘referrer spam’ or ‘ghost spam.’ It’s an ongoing problem that we’ve been battling for a while now – and it seems to be getting worse. Why is referrer spam a problem? Because it inflates your traffic data. At first glance, it looks like you’ve experienced a spike in traffic, when really it’s spam causing the numbers to bloat. The only way to see how many of those visits were from real people is to filter out referrer spam in Google Analytics. Like Jacob Marley and his rattling chains, ghost spam is nuisance – to say the least. At Ecreative, we’re doing everything we can to keep ghost spam out of our clients’ data. If you have questions about referrer spam, don’t hesitate to give us a call. Photo credit: emmeffe6 via Foter.com / CC BY