Google Analytics Reports are wrong because of traffic from a traffic-generating service

Question

i checked the Google Analytics reports of my company and found out that at some days i get spammed from a traffic generating service.

I have no idea why? Maybe some agency we worked together "did that for us". I could filter out some of the wrong organic traffic by keyword use (in the keyword report i can see the url of the service). But on the same days the traffic ist still wrong because the service also generated direct traffic. Its from all the countries, languages is always set and they generate pages per visit (mostly 2) and an average sessions-duration (mostly beteween 7 and 10 seconds). I now will filter out bacause of these metrics. Do you have another idea how to solve this problem?

Answer 1

If the "service" will give you an IP address, on a solution like Cloudflare (using it as an example bc it's what I have) you can add a Firewall Rule quite easily. There are a wide variety of ways to do this, I chose a managed option because you say "your company" - you certainly shouldn't go try to edit a .conf file on its server to block an IP.

This will look somewhat the same regardless of the platform (if not Cloudflare)

Anticipating this possibility, they could switch IP addresses. If this is the case, I would check the IP address each time this occurs and see if you can identify a trend.

It's unlikely that they're going to infinitely create IPs just to send you traffic. This sounds pretty sketchy tho..if this keeps up it's either malicious or someone (old agency?) is still paying them.

Answer 2

Go to your Google Analytics admin back door and add a filter only to include sessions from hostname equal to your domain or website. That will get rid of the data coming from that source for good.

There are many resources online to guide you on how to do this, but you could start here