I’m sure there’s a lot of clients that you’ve had that has said that their traffic is going down, with all th
e charts and data to prove it. This is what happened to one of Dianna Huff’s clients. The reason behind the downward trend was easy for her to diagnose – they created a Filtered View in Google Analytics, which excluded traffic coming from the people within the client’s company who accessed the site daily. The more important thing was they excluded referral spam. The referral spam had gotten pretty bad, as it out paced organic search, which was skewing data in the worst way.
After finding out what had happened, Dianna explained to the client that, because of the filters, comparing the traffic from this year to the previous year was like comparing apples to oranges – and the traffic was doing very well.
In this sort of case, raw traffic data in Google Analytics isn’t as accurate as we would want it to be. In a helpful how-to, Dianna will show Analytics beginners how to create a filter that excludes spam traffic and traffic from internal sources! Check out the link below to read up on her whole article!
Search Engine Land: Small Business Owners: 3 Steps To Creating Accurate Google Analytics Reports