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Everyday :(, the following user creates one hit on my google analytics which has 3-5 sessions and %100 bounce rate.

ISP: Digital Ocean

Operating System: Linux

City: san francisco

I want to block this, but can't find the IP.

SOLUTIONS I TRIED:

1- I installed a plugin (WP Statistics) to track user IPs, but it can't catch this user (or bot or whatever)

2- I recorded every IP address that hit my homepage, using following php code piece, but I can't catch the user.

$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']

I will be happy to hear your suggestions.

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    Is it worth blocking one IP even it may generate 100% bounce rate? There would be many situations like this, blocking is not the solution unless it might be causing issue which may not be i guess.
    – TopQnA
    Commented Jul 24, 2017 at 0:40
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    It is likely not someone who hits your sever but rather is using your GA code to spam or create some sort of havoc in GA.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Jul 24, 2017 at 1:17
  • @TopQnA , I believe so, there are 2 reasons. The first one is one by one the number of spams may increase, and it will be harder to detect them when my site gets more traffic, so I have to be in control from the begging. So it is actually not block just 1 IP. The second reason is that my site is a small site, and I am tring to improve my ranking on google and with high bounce rates it is harder. I believe that in 2017 bounce rate, and time on page is important factors to rank on google. Here is a video about it. youtube.com/watch?v=lyiikzjg9a0
    – HOY
    Commented Jul 24, 2017 at 8:54
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    I am aware of bounce rate and the impact on ranking etc. You also need to understand that traffic from the same IP (One or few) with higher bounce rate would have almost no impact. So, in my view, it will be just an overhead try to deal with it. Instead, same time could be used to improve the website quality etc. Google is quite aware of basic issues in general. I would say be productive.
    – TopQnA
    Commented Jul 24, 2017 at 8:59
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    @HOY Google Analytics data has no bearing on Google search ranking.
    – DisgruntledGoat
    Commented Jul 27, 2017 at 12:02

1 Answer 1

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This problem is related to spam actions against your GA account. Neither the WP plugin nor the php code would be able to record ghost visitor's (aka Ghost referral) IP address because they are hitting your GA account making HTTP requests by sending raw user interaction data directly to Google Analytics servers. In other words, they do not actually "visit" your website.

The best you can do is filtering these bots via GA Filters. Follow this post recommendations or this other one. I particularly like filtering by "hostname".

Hope that helps.

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  • It is a crying shame that after all these years Google has not solved this problem and does not appear to want to either.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Jul 24, 2017 at 1:18
  • @closetnoc it is a crying shame indeed.
    – Raul Reyes
    Commented Jul 24, 2017 at 1:34
  • I'm not sure they could completely solve this issue. I think the best they could do is make it more difficult for the spammers.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Jul 24, 2017 at 2:48
  • @StephenOstermiller It would be nice if they tried. I would not be critical if they at least pretend to give a damn. After all, it is their product! There is a simple solution available that would work with the existing system, however, each site would have to change their GA id. The solution existed since day one.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Jul 24, 2017 at 3:45
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    Google doesn't use GA data for ranking purposes. For SEO they use a similar metric: Bounce-Back-Rate (BBR). BBR is measured by Google independently of GA. See webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/54336 for my explanation.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Jul 24, 2017 at 10:09

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