Why You Need to Get Spam Out of Your Referral Data

Imagine that you've been struggling to lose weight for a long time. One day, you go to your local JC Penney and try on a pair of pants in your size. They're surprisingly loose, and you think it must mean that you've lost weight. You might think you've reached your goal. You might think you can skip the gym. But what you don't know is that the pants are mislabeled. You haven't lost any weight. You're just wearing size 18 pants with a size 12 label. It's the same with spam in your referral data. At first glance, it looks like your traffic has gone way up. But what's really happening is that spam bots are inflating your referral numbers, making it look like you're getting a lot of great traffic when you're really not. You might think you can scale back your digital marketing efforts -- which would be about as effective as skipping a gym when you're wearing wrongly-labeled pants.

Ok So My Referral Data is Full of Spam. So?!

You might think that it's not really a big deal to have spam in your referral data. You can just mentally subtract the spam referrals from real referrals to get an accurate number, right? Wrong. I mean, yes, you can do that but that's not all there is to the story. These spam bots aren't just coming to the site. They're crawling it. And the more spam bots you have crawling your site, the slower it's going to be. Think of your website as a lovely beachside restaurant, and the spam bots as obnoxious tourists. The occasional obnoxious tourist won't shut the restaurant down, but a whole crowd of obnoxious tourists will slow down service and lead to a bottle neck at the hostess podium, and the non-obnoxious, good-tipping customers will get fed up and go somewhere else. (Yes, it's metaphor day at Ecreative. Deal with it.)


Referral spam in Google Analytics.[/caption] You need to filter out spam traffic so that you can have:

• Accurate referral data, which is essential for keeping your marketing efforts on track
• Acceptable load times, which make users happy*

Spam Referrals and Industrial Marketing

It's a sad fact spam referrals are worse for industrial websites than they are for websites in other industries. For some reason, spammers see industrial sites as fertile ground for their nefarious efforts. We may never know exactly why this is, but we at Ecreative know how to safeguard industrial websites from spammers. If your referral data is gummed up with spam, we recommend that you contact us as soon as possible so that we can help you keep your referral data clean. *Acceptable load times make Google happy too. Rumor has it that Google is testing out a 'slow to load' label. We're keeping a close watch on that development, so come back to our blog for more information. Photo credit: jbcurio / Foter / CC BY