Filtering out ghost traffic from Google Analytics

Question

Recently I've been experiencing a large amount of (what I think is) ghost traffic.

I need help in creating a filter to exclude this traffic from my Google Analytics. URL's are showing up that have other websites appended to them.

Almost all articles I've read mention including only relevant hostnames but this doesn't seem to apply to my situation.

Here you can see the URL's with other random website addresses.(overworlf.com/evite.com/shmoop.com and many others)

Here is a screenshot of the hostnames none of them are out of the ordinary. I suspect this ghost traffic is using my main domain looking at the huge amount of users.

Answer 1

Almost all the analytics spammers insert data into your stats by pinging the GA tracker directly with fake data. They never visit your site and they usually just guess at the tracking id without knowing website host name associated with it. They won't send a host name, so it wouldn't appear in that report. See How to fight off Google Analytics referrer spammers?

That appears not be the case here. In this case these appear to be actual hits to your website. I tried one of those "top active pages" and it gives a 404 error. It looks like your 404 template has the GA tricking snippet installed on it. I don't think that is best practice. You could try taking the snippet off your 404 page. Then if you did get actual hits to such URLs, GA wouldn't count them as pages.