Google Analytics Referral Spam Fix: “Secret.ɢoogle.com You are invited!”

There has been a spam activity going on with Google Analytics which may make you observe a strange, not-so-big spike in the traffic of your website. If you check the Audience tab in your Analyics account for that particular website property, you’d notice a long-lengthy message in the Language set for those spam hits.

This is what that message actually reads like:

I tried to see the sources of all these nonsense hits on this site. Was expecting it to be like 2-3 in number, but I came up with a good number of sources (19), most of them of those are spammer’s own sites, or has got nothing to do with the mischief so happening.

What is it?

If you are taking it as an invitation to some secret product from Google, you took it all wrong! It’s actually an analytics spam spread by a Russian fan of Donald Trump, named Vitaly Popov.

Surprisingly, this guy has been adding all the popular posts on web covering about his mischief to the spam sources.

In case you are tracking back to discover the source of the traffic you are getting due to this spam, you’d land either on the spammer’s websites, or on those who has been disclosing the spam activity to the public.

While typing this post, I saw TheNextWeb.com in the referral list! And then only I figured out they already have an article about the spam activity. Nice move, Vitaly! :-/

How to fix it?

Well, it wasn’t easy at all before this analytics segment filter provided by AnalyticsEdge, all the credits and thanks to them.

Just follow the link above, and click on the “Import” button there OR import it from here directly by clicking this link.

You’ll be brought to a segment configuration dialog asking to choose a property from your Google Analytics account. Select a property, and click on the “Create” button.

On the next page, you should choose to enter just the URL of your website and click “Save”. But additionally, you may also want to add this one extra line in the filters, and then continue to save the changes:

addons.mozilla.org|abc.xyz|buketeg.xyz|biteg.xyz|brateg.xyz|budilneg.xyz|bukleteg.xyz|boltalko.xyz|bezlimitko.xyz|begalka.xyz|advokateg.xyz|arendovalka.xyz|alfabot.xyz|abcdefh.xyz|bank-rot.xyz|abcdeg.xyz|secret.ɢoogle.com|thenextweb.com|reddit.com|lifehacĸer.com

This line is a Google Analytics filter expression, and it contains an updated list of sources that spammer uses to display traffic on your website from. However, you may remove the websites from the above line that you think are your friends.

A word of caution: Do not start or end a filter expression with a vertical bar, i.e. “|”.

That’s it, you are done fixing it! Hope it was helpful. Feel free to share your thoughts. Thanks!