How to Block WordPress Referrer Spam in Google Analytics

When tracking your website traffic, it’s important to look for fake visitors or referrer spam. At WPBeginner and our other brands, we’ve experienced bot traffic on various occasions. These are visitors who come to your website and exit immediately.

Referrer spam sends misleading data to your site, which can pollute your analytics reports with spam links. As a result, you don’t get a clear picture of how your website is performing. This can negatively impact your efforts to optimize the user experience and prevent you from growing your online business.

To deal with this issue, we’ve tried and implemented different methods. For instance, you can use a security plugin that filters spam traffic, use a plugin that blocks referrer spam or list ghost links directly in Google Analytics.

In this article, we will show you how to block WordPress referrer spam in Google Analytics effectively.

What Is Referrer Spam in WordPress, and How Does It Affect Google Analytics?

Referrer spam in WordPress is a common spamming technique where fake traffic data is sent to a WordPress website.

This spam technique aims to pollute a website’s analytics data with spam URLs, keywords, and domain names.

It affects your Google Analytics reports as this data appears under Referral data and may affect your website’s overall page views, bounce rates, and session reports.

If you are seeing lots of suspicious-looking domains in your Referral reports, then they are most likely spam referrers.

Blocking these spam referrals will improve the accuracy of your Google Analytics reports and ensure that spam requests do not pollute your data.

That said, let’s look at how you can view referral traffic in Google Analytics and identify spam.

How to Check Referrer Spam in Google Analytics

Before you take any steps to block referrer spam, you will want to check that your website is experiencing it.

You can identify referral spam in Google Analytics. To get started, log in to your Google Analytics account.

After that, you can go to Reports » Acquisition » Traffic Acquisition.

From here, you’ll see different traffic sources for your website, including referrals.

Next, you can click the ‘+’ button to add another dimension.

You will now see different secondary dimensions to filter your traffic.

Simply head to Traffic source » Session source from the dimensions dropdown.

Google Analytics will now show the ‘Session source’ dimension of your traffic.

You can go through the list and look for domains that look suspicious or strange. A simple way to spot them is by looking at the engagement time. If it is 0 seconds, then they can be referrer spam.

Now, let’s take a look at how to easily block referrer spam in Google Analytics on a WordPress website. We will cover different methods, so you can click the links below to jump ahead to any section:

Method 1: Block Referrer Spam in Google Analytics with Sucuri

One easy way to block common referrer spam in Google Analytics is by using Sucuri.

It is one of the best WordPress security plugins and comes with a website firewall. The firewall blocks most common website threats, including referrer spam, before they even reach your website.

At WPBeginner, we also used Sucuri as our security plugin before switching to Cloudflare. It helped us block over 450,000 WordPress attacks in 3 months. To learn more, please see our Sucuri review.

Sucuri also comes with website monitoring, a malware scanner, an integrity check, and dozens of security features. This protects your website against hacking, malware, and brute force attacks.

First, you’ll need to install and activate the Sucuri plugin. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

The best part is that you don’t need to perform any additional steps to configure the plugin, as it works out of the box. After activation, Sucuri will start protecting your site from referrer spam and also scan it for malware.

You can also head over to the Sucuri Security » Dashboard page to see if the plugin found any immediate issues with your WordPress code.

To learn more, please see our ultimate WordPress security guide.

Method 2: Blocking Referrer Spam in Google Analytics With a Plugin

If you don’t want to use Sucuri, then you can use the Analytics Spam Blocker plugin to check referral traffic and block them manually. It is a free WordPress plugin that prevents any kind of spam from reaching your website by blocking it at the server level, leaving your analytics data untouched.

First, you need to install and activate the Analytics Spam Blocker plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit the Tools » Analytics Spam Blocker page from the WordPress dashboard to review plugin settings.

The plugin uses a referral spam blacklist to stop suspected sites from reaching your site and ruining analytics data.

Under the ‘Add a Domain’ section, you can also enter any suspicious domains that are already spamming your Google Analytics reports. But be careful when adding domains in the plugin settings, as it will block all traffic from that domain name, including sub-domains.

Method 3: Filter Out Ghost Referrers in Google Analytics

The first two techniques mentioned above will block referrer traffic that arrives at your website.

However, spammers may sometimes not send referral requests to your website. Instead, they can target your Google Analytics tracking code to trick it into recording a spam request.

These attempts will bypass filters on your website and may still appear in your Google Analytics reports.

You can filter these ghost referral spam in your Google Analytics account.

Simply log in to your Google Analytics dashboard and switch to the Admin view by clicking the gear icon in the bottom left corner.

From here, select the ‘Data streams’ option under the ‘Data collection and modification’ section.

This will bring the data streams connected to your Google Analytics property.

Go ahead and click on the data stream where you’d like to block spam referrers.

After selecting your data stream, you’ll see different settings.

Simply scroll down to the ‘Google tag’ section and then click the ‘Configure tag settings’ option.

Next, you will need to scroll down to the ‘Settings’ section.

From here, simply click the ‘Show more’ option to view more settings.

You should now see more settings.

Next, click the ‘List unwanted referrals’ tab.

This will bring you to the configuration screen.

Under Match Type, choose ‘Referral domain contains,’ and then add the domain you want to block next to it.

Click on the ‘Add condition’ button to add another domain if needed.

Once finished, just click the ‘Save’ button at the top right corner of the screen to save your settings.

Google Analytics will now exclude these referrals from your reports.

We hope this article helped you learn how to block referrer spam in Google Analytics effectively. You may also want to see our ultimate conversion tracking guide for beginners or how to properly set up eCommerce tracking on your website.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.