How to filter a spam site from Google Analytics referral traffic

Question

A few months back, I had set up the Google Analytics filter to remove bot traffic from bottraffic.xyz.

Yet, it shows up on my Referral Traffic source. Any idea how to remove it from my Google Analytics?

Answer 1

You are filtering on the wrong thing. You have the filter field set to Hostname. That will filter Google Analytics hits that claim to be recording statistics for that site. If you filter on the host name to prevent GA spam, you would usually exclude all host names that don't match the domain name for your site.

According to this article and this Google post, to filter referral spam, you want to change the Filter Field to Campaign Source. (Not Referrer as you might expect.)