Direct traffic spam on Google Analytics: how can you identify and filter it?

[RosemaryB]

One of my smaller clients noticed a huge jump in direct traffic visits last month.  The bounce rate was around 97% so I'm pretty certain that most of the traffic was illegitimate.  I know how to filter out spam referrals and organic keywords in Google Analytics.  However I'm not sure what to do about direct traffic spam.  Are there recommendations for filtering this out?  Can I identify spam IP addresses?

[OptiBacUK]

Can you add a secondary dimension of medium and upload another screenshot? You will be able to cut out a large number of spam visits when you so that.

Essentially you will end up with hostname (not set) having medium of referral and medium of none.

Upload a screenshot and I may be in a better place to advise

[RosemaryB]

I was looking for spam hostnames however a large volume of traffic coming to my clients website is from "not set" hostnames.  I have feeling the (not set) hostname includes spammers.  Do you know what else I can do about this?

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[BradsDeals]

Yep, hostname is where I would start looking as well. Also geographic segments like country and region if your site is targeting only a particular country/state/city.

And building on what Brett is saying, find a list of common nuisance bots and block them via robots.txt. That may help as well.

[Brett-Harland]

Hello Rosemary,

Couple of things to check in GA under view settings under admin make sure Bot filtering is checked. Also under the menu in filtering you can add and IP exclusion list (from other office locations for example). Further you can add websites that you do not want referral traffic to be recording from this can be done under property/tracking info/ referral exclusion list

[Travis_Bailey]

Create a segment that only shows traffic to the hostname. (yoursite.com, youtube.com, paypal.com) That's it. It's pretty amazing how much traffic would appear to be spam.