Referrer SPAM List: How to Exclude Referral Spam from Google Analytics 4
Have you ever checked your Google Analytics (GA4) reports only to find some strange referrers in the reports? You go to their site, and there’s no mention of you, but there are a ton of other offers there. Guess what? Those people never actually referred traffic to your site.
Ever.
If you didn’t realize how Google Analytics works, a pixel is added to every page load that grabs a ton of data and sends it to Google’s Analytics engine. Google Analytics then deciphers the data and organizes it neatly into the reports that you’re looking at. No magic there!
But some idiotic spamming companies have deconstructed the Google Analytics pixel path and now fake the path and hit your Google Analytics instance. They get your data stream code from the script that you have embedded in the page, and then, from their server, they hit GA servers repeatedly until they begin popping up on your referral reports.
It’s truly awful because they never even initiated the visit from your site! In other words, there’s no means for your site to block them. I went around and around on this with our host, who patiently explained what they were doing over and over until it got through my thick skull. It’s called a ghost referral or ghost referrer since they never actually touch your site.
Honestly, I’m still unsure why Google hasn’t simply started maintaining a database of referral spammers. What a great feature that would be for their platform. Since no visit has occurred, these spammers are wreaking havoc on your reports. For one of our clients, referrer spam makes up over 13% of their site visits!
Update List Unwanted Referrals
- Sign in to your Google Analytics account.
- Go to Admin settings.
- Click on Data streams under the Data collection and modification.
- Select your web stream details.
- Click on Configure tag settings.
- Expand show more to find List unwanted referrals and click on it.
- There’s an updated list of referrer spammers on Github that Matomo users are using, and it’s pretty good. I’m pulling that list automatically below and formatting it so you can copy it into the right field.
- Select Match Type Referral domain matches RegEx and paste the values into the field.
You’ll see tons of server scripts and plugins out there to try to block referral spammers from your site. Don’t bother using them. Remember that these weren’t actual visits to your site. The scripts these folks use often fake the GA pixel directly from their server. They never actually landed on your site.
