In recent times, after serving the Google Analytics Panel, we observed that a new type of domain is there in our traffic data. Perhaps, it is one of the latest referral spams that have been found in Google Analytics. This type of spam has been very active lately, attacking thousands of properties, and in some cases, making their reports hard to read.
When diving a little deeper into the analytics arena, it can be observed that some data value range is unbelievably high, close to 100%, Bounce Rate, and 0 seconds Avg. Session Time, which has a significant impact on the global metrics, especially considering that it hits multiple times at once.
Misinformation about referral spam in Google Analytics is quite apparent these days. There are many awareness platforms which talk about the different types of malware involved in the cyberspace and how can they harm your website. But the truth is that ghost spam doesn’t have any connection with your site.
In our earlier blog we taught about “How To Remove Referral Spam Traffic From Google Analytics”, and now in this guide, we will show you a simple and efficient way to remove and block snip.to, as well any other ghost spam from your Google Analytics reports.
What is the Referral Spam “Snip.to”?
This referral is arranged as a Spam data, this means that it never accesses any of your pages, it all happens within your reports in Google Analytics. The spam has a negative impact only for your analytics report preparation, but it won’t affect your search rankings in any way. For that reason, there is no need to worry about harmful backlinks or security issues.
If you try to go to snip.to, you will be redirected to sharebutton.to – an advertisement service.
What is the purpose of this type of referral spam?
As most of the spam in Google Analytics, the purpose of this spam is to get attention, and in this case, to drive traffic to Sharebutton.to.
It’s important to note that Sharebutton.to might not be the one behind the spam, and most likely, the spammer might be using a kind of affiliate to get a commission from them. Either way, we will show you how to get rid of this referral on your Google Analytics panel.
How to block snip.to referral?
One of the easiest methods to block these types of spam is to create a filter for the particular spammer.
Listed below are the steps to create a filter in campaign source:
- Go to your Google Analytics account and select the Admin tab
- In the column View Select Filters GA filters – snip.to
- Click on New Filter GA New filter – snip.to
- Enter Referrer Spam as a name for the Filter
- Select Filter Type Custom
- In Filter Field, find and select Campaign Source
- In the Filter Pattern text box, paste this (offer|free\-|share\-
|mercedes|buy|cheap|semalt|googlsucks|benz|sl500|hulfington|buttons| darodar|pistonheads|motor|money|blackhat|backlink|webrank|seo|phd| crawler|anonymous|\d{3}.*forum|porn|webmaster|flipboard|fl\.ru| mbca|ahrefs|game|\.io|^sex|^video) expression
In our previous blog, we have mentioned some easy to follow spam removal techniques on how to create filter. You can get these techniques, here.
