Collecting and analyzing website data is invaluable to meet the business goals of a website. Google Analytics is a great tool to view website traffic data and gives you many insights to improving user experience. This is why having true data is critical, but data can potentially become useless if your website is hit with spam traffic.
What is Spam Traffic?
There are different types of spam traffic, but the most common is spam referral traffic. This type of traffic comes from bots that impersonate a referral link and the objective is to influence you to visit their website. Referral links represent the sources linking back to your website. Usually, referral links are great for SEO, but referrer spam can negatively impact your data. For example, semalt.com is a common spam referral source. It’s a legitimate website, but useless for your data because it can degrade important website metrics like bounce rate, pages per visit and average visit duration. Consequently, you may have an unclear picture of your website traffic and performance. Continue reading “How To Protect Website Analytics From Spam”