How To Remove Specific (spammy) Referring Domains to Prevent Google Analytics Stats Being Ruined!

If you use Google Analytics to track visitor numbers, referral sources, and a host of other statistics about your web traffic (we do, and we manage this for a lot of our clients) you may have noticed over the previous year or two that a referral source which includes the domain “semalt.com” – or some other domain which doesn’t actually link in to your site – has been showing up in your site’s list of referrers.

If your website has relatively low traffic, this traffic, which almost always bounces, and is broadly speaking “bot” traffic, may be ruining your website’s statistics, by changing the number of visitors to be higher than it really should be, and also altering the page time, bounce rate, and other core statistics which can help you to guage user interaction with your website.

There has to be a way to filter out this traffic, right?!

Right!

How to Setup a Removal for Specific Traffic Sources using Google Analytics

  1. On Google Analytics, go to the Admin section for the property concerned (if you’re looking at the statistics for the website in question, hit “Admin” in the top menu);
  2. In the second menu along, under the heading “Property”, click “Tracking Info” – this will dropdown a list of options;
  3. Select “Referral Exclusion List” – a well named option!
  4. Click “Add Referral Exclusion” and type in “semalt.com” (or whatever domain you’d like to stop tracking visitors from!).
  5. Repeat as necessary for any other rogues!

This will filter out any future visitors from this domain from your statistics, giving you better data. Better data is good.

Finding the referrer exclusion list in Google Analytics

Works for You?

Leave a comment below if this helped you to get an annoying semalt.com based problem with your Google Analytics fixed – it makes us happy to learn when our tutorials make people’s lives easier!

1 thought on “How To Remove Specific (spammy) Referring Domains to Prevent Google Analytics Stats Being Ruined!”

  1. Note that you need a certain type of tracking for this to work out of the box – it needs to be the following (from Google Analytics):

    These settings only work with the analytics.js version of the tracking code. If you’re using the ga.js version, configure these settings in your code. If you’re transitioning to analytics.js from ga.js, customize these settings to match your previous configuration for data continuity.

    Reply

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