Solving the issue of referral spam in Google Analytics

At this time, Google Analytics has a big issue, the so-called referral spam. Especially on sites with relatively low traffic, this pretty much ruins the presented data.

Google is taking forever to solve the problem, so, for now, it has to be the user to try to solve it. Fortunately, I found this article that presents a solution.

Definitive Guide to Removing Referral Spam – Analytics Edge

The solution is simpler than you might think. Instead of individually filter out each of the referrers (which seems that doesn’t work very well), you make a filter that lets through only the traffic that originates from the site where the Analytics code is installed.

I implemented this solution today, let’s see how it works.