Did your site get hit with the recent GA4 referral spam traffic? Wondering what these domains sending traffic to your site are? In recent weeks, we have seen rida.tokyo, news.grets.store, info.seders.website, static.seders.website, kar.razas.site, and trast.mantero.online.
If you saw this traffic in your recent reports, you probably want to know how to remove it. You can tell it is referral spam based on the source domain, the temporary high traffic spikes over time, and the low engagement.
Hopefully, you didn’t further examine these domains by visiting the websites! Many of them don’t truly exist, and some referral spam is actually an attempt to get you to visit a site that may contain malware.
List Unwanted Referrals
Your initial instinct might be to use the tag setting for your Data Stream to “List unwanted referrals.” Unfortunately, the name of the setting is misleading, so this is not the solution to bot traffic.
Adding spam domains to this configuration will only prevent the traffic from being classified as referral traffic in your reports; it will not exclude the traffic or filter it from your reporting overall.
This configuration is for excluding self-referrals, such as when a user is temporarily redirected off domain during payment before being redirected back. It is intended for use in the same way we used to set “Referral Exclusions” in Universal Analytics.
Filter Bot Traffic
Universal Analytics used to have a robust tool for excluding traffic from being collected and included in your reporting views. Google Analytics 4 does not have any such settings. You can only exclude internal and developer traffic based on IP address or whether debug parameters are populated.
Filters have never been the best way to handle this issue anyway, because spammers are clever, and by the time you’ve learned a new referral domain to exclude, it’s too late because they’ve already infiltrated your reports.
Thoughtful and Multidimensional Analysis
The answer is thoughtful and multidimensional analysis. If you’re reporting on single metrics (such as sessions) or top referral sources without any additional investigation or context, you won’t be getting the best insights, and bot traffic could obfuscate the true narrative of your website usage.
Adding breakdown dimensions such as channel groupings, source / mediums, or analyzing key traffic sources individually will keep you from inadvertently making decisions based on false bot traffic.
If you’re using a tool, such as Looker Studio, to analyze your Google Analytics, you can retroactively add filters to keep any known bot traffic out of your reports.
It’s not the best use of your time as an action-oriented analyst to stress about preventing bots from showing up in your Analytics. There simply isn’t a solution at this time for this issue from an Analytics and reporting standpoint, but Google is hopefully working on it.
If bots are causing problems on your site beyond just short term spikes of referral spam in your Google Analytics, your webmaster may need to consider adding a solution to detect and protect against bot attacks. Bots can be malicious, and can result in customer data breaches, DDoS attacks, or simply just lead to a poor user experience. If your servers get overloaded, and the site slows or crashes, users are going to be understandably unhappy.
