New features give manufacturers valuable search query and competitor insights, as well as new product information to highlight in Google Shopping.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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New Year’s resolutions – let’s be honest – hardly ever work. Research suggests that they are achieved by just 8% of people. New Year’s resolutions are usually over-ambitious and, by their very nature, are unlikely to be achieved instantly.
In reality, change and progress are usually a result of small steps and time. To help your professional year get off to the best possible start, we’ve rounded up our favorite new features from 2018, organized them by hot topic, and listed how you can put them to good use in a ‘stop, start, and continue’ format.
To be data-driven or customer-driven? The truth is, they should go hand in hand.
2018 saw us take an innovative approach to data that lets us scale our platform in ways we could never have hoped to before. This means we can process data and return segmentation queries at scale and speed. Leveraging vast amounts of (customer) data couldn’t be easier.
Another addition is our integration with our newly acquired CPaaS team. Using their API technology, we have extended our reach. Today, you can build intelligent marketing programs featuring SMS, Facebook Messenger, Push Notifications, and more. In 2019 we are committed to bringing even more engagement channels into the fold.
We launched a comprehensive suite of functionality to help you manage consent obligations effectively. It’s so simple to use, but underneath we had to build smart new ways of working with our existing data to ensure everything works smoothly.
Here are some quick tips to keep you up to speed in 2019:
The post 2019: The year of stop, start, continue. appeared first on The Marketing Automation Blog.
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In the world of marketing, this journey is often ‘replatforming’ and it can feel like a daunting prospect, especially as you’re putting your trust in a new supplier to get you up to speed with minimal disruption.
Wouldn’t it be great if your onboarding process could be upgraded from economy to business class, providing peace of mind that’ll boost your customer experience? That’s the kind of service you get when you introduce dotmailer to your business – and I’m going to tell you all about it here.
Finally, you got the sign-off and you’re joining dotmailer; exciting times!
Some people begin to panic at this point – after all, it can feel a bit like buying and moving into a new home – but there’s really no need to worry. There’s a checklist of things to do and one of our dedicated Digital Program Managers will orchestrate the process for you, pulling the right strings at the right time and involving the right experts exactly when required, until everything’s checked off and you’re fully onboarded.
We offer seven different onboarding packages, depending on your requirements and budget. Our dotmailer consultants will point you in the right direction to make sure you get the right level of cover.
Once the agreement is signed and you’ve chosen the type of onboarding service you’d like, the process can begin.
You’ll be assigned a Digital Program Manager (DPM) who’ll manage the onboarding process, along with an Account Manager who’ll be your day-to-day go-to person once your onboarding has been completed. Your DPM will organise a kick-off call to go through your order form and any additional items purchased, together with clarifying roles and timelines. And, of course, you’ll have the opportunity to ask any burning questions.
I may have made the process sound quite simple, so I thought it’d be helpful to give you an idea of what goes on behind the scenes and why the onboarding process can be lengthy at times.
First things first, we create a detailed, dynamic project schedule in our project management tool and then assign tasks to the relevant parties. The plan includes all your account details and a breakdown of all activated features/timelines.
The DPM team is here to support, supervise and guide the activities of your account setup, from new template creation, the custom from address (CFA) and data management to creating and testing your first campaign. Some of this involves liaising with internal teams to ensure relevant experts are involved at the right time. Here are some of the people we’ll often be working with:
We’ll share regular updates throughout the onboarding process via calls and alerts sent through our project management tool.
Once onboarding is complete, your Account Manager will be your direct line for advice and strategic guidance. They’ll proactively suggest improvements and add-ons that’ll drive up your return on investment, booking in regular catch-up calls to see how things are progressing.
We work with more than 3,500 brands globally. Here are just a couple of companies that have recently joined the fold…
The Prince’s Trust
“dotmailer were incredibly helpful in supporting The Prince’s Trust to get onboarded, answering questions big and small along the way and even screen sharing so we knew exactly what to do. They’ve designed templates, assisted with forms and were there for our first send out. We now have so much more confidence with our emails – and look forward to the future.” Donna White, Head of Digital Marketing
Virgin Active
“All your team made this relatively big project as easy as anything. From right at the start to now, it has all been seamless. You all know your product like the back of your hand and you’ve caught the interest of every man, woman and their dog at Virgin Active. You also managed to do it all in less than a month and we all love you for it!” Virgin Active Team
The post Platform onboarding: a smoother start to a successful journey appeared first on The Marketing Automation Blog.
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The top three reasons were People, Product and Opportunity. I met the people who make up our business and heard their stories from the past 18 years, learned about the platform and market leading status they had built in the UK, and saw that I could add value with my U.S. high growth business experience. I’ve been working with marketers, entrepreneurs and business owners for years across a series of different roles, and saw that I could apply what I’d learned from that and the start-up space to dotmailer’s U.S. operation. dotmailer has had clients in the U.S. for 12 years and we’re positioned to grow the user base of our powerful and easy-to-use platform significantly. I knew I could make a difference here, and what closed the deal for me was the people. Every single person I’ve met is deeply committed to the business, to the success of our customers and to making our solution simple and efficient. We’re a great group of passionate people and I’m proud to have joined the dotfamily.
Dan Morris, dotmailer’s EVP for North America in the new NYC office
dotmailer has been in business and in this space for more than 18 years. We were a web agency, then a Systems Integrator, and we got into the email business that way, ultimately building the dotmailer platform thousands of people use daily. This means we know this space better than anyone and we have the perfect solutions to align closely with our customers and the solutions flexible enough to grow with them. My role is to take all that experience and the platform and grow our U.S. presence. My early focus has been on identifying the right team to execute our growth plans. We want to be the market leader in the U.S. in the next three years – just like we’ve done in the UK – so getting the right people in the right spots was critical. We quickly assessed the skills of the U.S. team and made changes that were necessary in order to provide the right focus on customer success. Next, we set out to completely rebuild dotmailer’s commercial approach in the U.S. We simplified our offers to three bundles, so that pricing and what’s included in those bundles is transparent to our customers. We’ve heard great things about this already from clients and partners. We’re also increasing our resources on customer success and support. We’re intensely focused on ease of on-boarding, ease of use and speed of use. We consistently hear how easy and smooth a process it is to use dotmailer’s tools. That’s key for us – when you buy a dotmailer solution, we want to onboard you quickly and make sure you have all of your questions answered right away so that you can move right into using it. Customers are raving about this, so we know it’s working well.
I’ve been at dotmailer for eight months now and I’m really proud of all we’ve accomplished together. We spent a lot of time assessing where we needed to restructure and where we needed to invest. We made the changes we needed, invested in our partner program, localized tech support, customer on-boarding and added customer success team members. We have the right people in the right roles and it’s making a difference. We have a commercial approach that is clear with the complete transparency that we wanted to provide our customers. We’ve got a more customer-focused approach and we’re on-boarding customers quickly so they’re up and running faster. We have happier customers than ever before and that’s the key to everything we do.
I thought it was very important to create a NY office space that was tied to branding and other offices around the world, and also had its own NY energy and culture for our team here – to foster collaboration and to have some fun. It was also important for us that we had a flexible space where we could welcome customers, partners and resellers, and also hold classes and dotUniversity training sessions. I’m really grateful to the team who worked on the space because it really reflects our team and what we care about. At any given time, you’ll see a training session happening, the team collaborating, a customer dropping in to ask a few questions or a partner dropping in to work from here. We love our new, NYC space.
We had a spectacular reception this week to celebrate the opening of this office with customers, partners and the dotmailer leadership team in attendance. Please take a look at the photos from our event on Facebook.
Guests and the team at dotmailer’s new NYC office warming party
The start-up space is a great place to learn. You have to know where every dollar is going and coming from, so every choice you make needs to be backed up with a business case for that investment. You try lots of different things to see if they’ll work and you’re ready to turn those tactics up or down quickly based on an assessment of the results. You also learn things don’t have to stay the way they are, and can change if you make them change. You always listen and learn – to customers, partners, industry veterans, advisors, etc. to better understand what’s working and not working. dotmailer has been in business for 18 years now, and so there are so many great contributors across the business who know how things have worked and yet are always keen to keep improving. I am constantly in listening and learning mode so that I can understand all of the unique perspectives our team brings and what we need to act on.
On our path to being the market leader in the U.S., I’m focused on three things going forward: 1 – I want our customers to be truly happy. It’s already a big focus in the dotmailer organization – and we’re working hard to understand their challenges and goals so we can take product and service to the next level. 2 – Creating an even more robust program around partners, resellers and further building out our channel partners to continuously improve sales and customer service programs. We recently launched a certification program to ensure partners have all the training and resources they need to support our mutual customers. 3 – We have an aggressive growth plan for the U.S. and I’m very focused on making sure our team is well trained, and that we remain thoughtful and measured as we take the steps to grow. We want to always keep an eye on what we’re known for – tools that are powerful and simple to use – and make sure everything else we offer remains accessible and valuable as we execute our growth plans.
The questions we usually get are around price, service level and flexibility. How much does dotmailer cost? How well are you going to look after my business? How will you integrate into my existing stack and then my plans for future growth? We now have three transparent bundle options with specifics around what’s included published right on our website. We have introduced a customer success team that’s focused only on taking great care of our customers and we’re hearing stories every day that tells me this is working. And we have all of the tools to support our customers as they grow and to also integrate into their existing stacks – often integrating so well that you can use dotmailer from within Magento, Salesforce or Dynamics, for example.
In addition to the ones above – ease of use, speed of use and the ability to scale with you. With dotmailer’s tiered program, you can start with a lighter level of functionality and grow into more advanced functionality as you need it. The platform itself is so easy to use that most marketers are able to build campaigns in minutes that would have taken hours on other platforms. Our customer success team is also with you all the way if ever you want or need help. We’ve built a very powerful platform and we have a fantastic team to help you with personalized service as an extended part of your team and we’re ready to grow with you.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the road, one year I attended 22 tradeshows! Top tip when flying is to be willing to give up your seat for families or groups once you’re at the airport gate, as you’ll often be rewarded with a better seat for helping the airline make the family or group happy. Win win! Since joining dotmailer, I’m focused on being in office and present for the team and customers as much as possible. I can usually be found in our new, NYC office where I spend a lot of time with our team, in customer meetings, in trainings and other hosted events, sales conversations or marketing meetings. I’m here to help the team, clients and partners to succeed, and will always do my best to say yes! Once our prospective customers see how quickly and efficiently they can execute tasks with dotmailer solutions vs. their existing solutions, it’s a no-brainer for them. I love seeing and hearing their reactions.
I’m originally from Yorkshire in England, and grew up just outside York. I moved to the U.S. about seven years ago to join a very fast growing startup, we took it from 5 to well over 300 people which was a fantastic experience. I moved to NYC almost two years ago, and I love exploring this great city. There’s so much to see and do. Outside of dotmailer, my passion is cars, and I also enjoy skeet shooting, almost all types of music, and I love to travel – my goal is to get to India, Thailand, Australia and Japan in the near future.
Want to find out more about the dotfamily? Check out our recent post about Darren Hockley, Global Head of Support.
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Australia has a resident population of more than 24 million and, according to eMarketer, the country’s ecommerce sales are predicted to reach A$32.56 billion by 2017. The country’s remote location in the APAC region means that unlike European countries or the USA, traditionally there have been a lack of global brands sold locally.
Of course, we also know that many expatriates, particularly from inside the Commonwealth, have made Australia their home and are keen to buy products they know and love from their country of origin.
All of these factors present a huge and potentially lucrative opportunity for non-Australian brands wanting to open up their new and innovative products to a fresh market, or compete for market share.
But it’s not just non-Australian retailers who are at an advantage here: Australia was late to the ecommerce party because native, established brands were trading well without it. Subsequently, Australian retailers’ ecommerce technology stacks are much more recent and not burdened by legacy systems. This makes it much easier to extend, or get started with, best-of-breed technologies and cash in on a market that’s booming. To put some of this into perspective, Magento’s innovative ecommerce platform currently takes 42% of Australia’s market share and the world’s first adopter of Magento 2.0 was an Australian brand.
The GST loophole
At the moment, local retailers are campaigning against a rule that exempts foreign websites from being charged a 10% general sales tax (GST) on purchases under A$1,000. And in 2013, Australian consumers made $3.11 billion worth of purchases under A$1,000.[1]
While the current GST break appears to put non-Australian retailers at an advantage, Australian-based brands such as Harvey Norman are using it to their advantage by setting up ecommerce operations in Asia to enjoy the GST benefit.
Australian consumers have also countered the argument by saying that price isn’t always the motivator when it comes to making purchasing decisions.
It’s not a place where no man has gone before
Often, concerns around meeting local compliance and lack of overseas business knowledge prevent outsiders from taking the leap into cross-border trade. However, this ecommerce passport, created by Ecommerce Worldwide and NORA, is designed to support those considering selling in Australia. The guide provides a comprehensive look into everything from the country’s economy and trade status, to logistics and dealing with international payments.
Global expansion success stories are also invaluable sources of information. For instance, it’s not just lower-end retailers that are fitting the bill, with brands like online luxury fashion retailer Net-a-Porter naming Australia as one of its biggest markets.
How tech-savvy are the Aussies?
One of the concerns you might have as a new entrant into the market is how you’ll reach and sell to your new audience, particularly without having a physical presence. The good news is that more than 80% of the country is digitally enabled and 60% of mobile phone users own a smartphone – so online is deeply rooted into the majority of Australians’ lives. [2]
Marketing your brand
Heard the saying “Fire bullets then fire cannonballs”? In any case, you’ll want to test the waters and gauge people’s reactions to your product or service.
It all starts with the website because, without it, you’re not discoverable or searchable, and you’ve nowhere to drive people to when running campaigns. SEO and SEM should definitely be a priority, and an online store that can handle multiple regions and storefronts, like Magento, will make your life easier. A mobile-first mentality and well thought-out UX will also place you in a good position.
Once your new web store is set up, you should be making every effort to collect visitors’ email addresses, perhaps via a popover. Why? Firstly, email is one of the top three priority areas for Australian retailers, because it’s a cost-effective, scalable marketing channel that enables true personalization.
Secondly, email marketing automation empowers you to deliver the customer experience today’s consumer expects, as well as enabling you to communicate with them throughout the lifecycle. Check out our ‘Do customer experience masters really exist?’ whitepaper for some real-life success stories.
Like the Magento platform, dotmailer is set up to handle multiple languages, regions and accounts, and is designed to grow with you.
In summary, there’s great scope for ecommerce success in Australia, whether you’re a native bricks-and-mortar retailer, a start-up or a non-Australian merchant. The barriers to cross-border trade are falling and Australia is one of APAC’s most developed regions in terms of purchasing power and tech savviness.
We recently worked with ecommerce expert Chloe Thomas to produce a whitepaper on cross-border trade, which goes into much more detail on how to market and sell successfully in new territories. You can download a free copy here.
[1] Australian Passport 2015: Cross-Border Trading Report
[2] Australian Passport 2015: Cross-Border Trading Report
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Looking to start building those citations for local SEO? Columnist Lydia Jorden shares her strategy for determining which local business listing sites are worth investing in.
The post Prioritizing Local Search Profile Listings: 2 Methods appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Posted by EricEnge
How do the SERPs for commercial queries vary from the treatment of informational queries? Moz is about to publish its new Search Engine Ranking Factors, and was kind enough to provide me with access to their raw ranking data. Today I am going to share some of what I found.
In addition, I am going to compare it against raw ranking data pulled by my company, Stone Temple Consulting (STC). What makes this so interesting is that the Moz data is based on commercial queries across 165,177 pages and the STC data is based on informational queries over 182,340 pages (for a total of 347,517 result pages). Let’s dive in!
Google rolled out their Mobile-Friendly Update on April 21 to much fanfare. We published our study results on how big that impact was here, and in that test, we tracked a set of 15,235 SERPs both before and after the SERPs.
The following chart shows the percentage of the top 10 results in the SERPs that are mobile friendly for the Moz (commercial) queries, and the STC informational queries before and after the mobile update:
Clearly, the commercial queries are returning a much larger percentage of mobile friendly results than the informational queries. Much of this may be due to it being more important to people running E-commerce sites to have a mobile-friendly site.
What this suggests to us is that publishers of E-commerce sites have been faster to adopt mobile friendliness than publishers of informational sites. That makes sense. Of course, our friends at Google know this is more important for commercial queries, too.
Regardless of query type, you can see that more than 60% of the results meet Google’s current definition for mobile friendliness. For commercial queries, it’s nearly 3/4 of them. Obviously, if you are not currently mobile friendly, then solve that, but that’s not the whole story.
Over time, I believe that what is considered mobile friendly is going to change. The mobile world will become much more than just viewing your current desktop site with a smaller screen and a crappier keyboard. What are some more things you can expect in the long term?
My third point is an item that is already in progress, and the first two are really not for most people at this time. However, I put them out there to stimulate some thinking that much more is going to happen in this space than meets the eye. In the short term, what can you do?
My suggestion is that you start looking at the mobile version of your site as more than a different rendering of your desktop site. What are the different use cases between mobile and desktop? Consider running two surveys of your users, one of desktop users and one of smartphone users, and ask them what they are looking for, and what they would like to see. My bet is that you will quickly see that the use cases are different in material ways.
In the near term, you can leverage this information to make your mobile site optimization work better for users, probably without re-architecting it entirely. In the longer term, collecting this type of data will prepare you for considering more radical design differences between your desktop and mobile sites.
Another one of the newer ranking factors is whether or not a site uses HTTPS. Just this past July 22, Google’s Gary Illyes clarified again that this is a minor ranking signal that acts like a tiebreaker in cases where the ranking for two competing pages are “more or less equal.”
How has that played out in the SERPs? Let’s take a look:
As with the mobile-friendliness, we once again see the commercial queries placing significantly more emphasis on this factor than the informational queries. Yet, the penetration levels are clearly far lower than they are for mobile friendliness. So should I care about this then?
Yes, it matters. Here are three reasons why:
Yes, I know there is much debate about whether or not you need to have HTTPS if all you are doing is running a content site. But a lot of big players out there are taking a simple stance: that it’s time for the plain text web to come to an end.
The big thing that HTTPS helps prevent is Man in the Middle Attacks. Do read the linked article if you don’t know what that is. Basically though, when you communicate with a non-secure web site, it’s pretty trivial for someone to intercept the communication and monitor or alter the information flow between you and the sending web site.
The most trivial form of this can occur any time you connect to a third party Wifi connection. People can inject ads you don’t want, or simply monitor everything you do and build a profile about you. Is that what you want?
Let me offer a simple example: Have you ever connected to Wifi in a hotel? What’s the first thing that happens? You try to go to a website, but instead you get a login screen asking for your room number and last name to sign in – and most times they charge you some fee.
That’s the concept – you tried to go to a web site, and instead got served different content (the Wifi login screen). The hotel can do this at any time. Even after you login and pay their fee, they can intercept your communication with other web sites and modify the content. A simple application for this it to inject ads. They can also monitor and keep a record of every site you visit. They can do this because they are in the middle.
In an HTTPS world, they will still be able to intercept the initial connection, but once you are connected, they will no longer be able to see inside the content going back and forth between you and the https websites you choose to access.
Eventually, the plain text web will come to an end. As this movement grows, more and more publishers will make the switch to HTTPS, and Google will dial up the strength of this signal as a ranking factor. If you have not made the switch, then get it into your longer term plans.
Both mobile-friendliness and HTTPS support appear to matter more to commercial sites today. I tend to think that this is more a result of more e-commerce site publishers and informational site publishers have made the conversions, rather than it being the impact of the related Google algorithms. Regardless of that, the importance of both of these factors will grow, and it would be wise to aggressively prepare for the future.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
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Posted by CarloSeo
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.
The spam in Google Analytics (GA) is becoming a serious issue. Due to a deluge of referral spam from social buttons, adult sites, and many, many other sources, people are starting to become overwhelmed by all the filters they are setting up to manage the useless data they are receiving.
The good news is, there is no need to panic. In this post, I’m going to focus on the most common mistakes people make when fighting spam in GA, and explain an efficient way to prevent it.
But first, let’s make sure we understand how spam works. A couple of months ago, Jared Gardner wrote an excellent article explaining what referral spam is, including its intended purpose. He also pointed out some great examples of referral spam.
The spam in Google Analytics can be categorized by two types: ghosts and crawlers.
The vast majority of spam is this type. They are called ghosts because they never access your site. It is important to keep this in mind, as it’s key to creating a more efficient solution for managing spam.
As unusual as it sounds, this type of spam doesn’t have any interaction with your site at all. You may wonder how that is possible since one of the main purposes of GA is to track visits to our sites.
They do it by using the Measurement Protocol, which allows people to send data directly to Google Analytics’ servers. Using this method, and probably randomly generated tracking codes (UA-XXXXX-1) as well, the spammers leave a “visit” with fake data, without even knowing who they are hitting.
This type of spam, the opposite to ghost spam, does access your site. As the name implies, these spam bots crawl your pages, ignoring rules like those found in robots.txt that are supposed to stop them from reading your site. When they exit your site, they leave a record on your reports that appears similar to a legitimate visit.
Crawlers are harder to identify because they know their targets and use real data. But it is also true that new ones seldom appear. So if you detect a referral in your analytics that looks suspicious, researching it on Google or checking it against this list might help you answer the question of whether or not it is spammy.
I’ve been following this issue closely for the last few months. According to the comments people have made on my articles and conversations I’ve found in discussion forums, there are primarily three mistakes people make when dealing with spam in Google Analytics.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is trying to block Ghost Spam from the .htaccess file.
For those who are not familiar with this file, one of its main functions is to allow/block access to your site. Now we know that ghosts never reach your site, so adding them here won’t have any effect and will only add useless lines to your .htaccess file.
Ghost spam usually shows up for a few days and then disappears. As a result, sometimes people think that they successfully blocked it from here when really it’s just a coincidence of timing.
Then when the spammers later return, they get worried because the solution is not working anymore, and they think the spammer somehow bypassed the barriers they set up.
The truth is, the .htaccess file can only effectively block crawlers such as buttons-for-website.com and a few others since these access your site. Most of the spam can’t be blocked using this method, so there is no other option than using filters to exclude them.
Another error is trying to use the referral exclusion list to stop the spam. The name may confuse you, but this list is not intended to exclude referrals in the way we want to for the spam. It has other purposes.
For example, when a customer buys something, sometimes they get redirected to a third-party page for payment. After making a payment, they’re redirected back to you website, and GA records that as a new referral. It is appropriate to use referral exclusion list to prevent this from happening.
If you try to use the referral exclusion list to manage spam, however, the referral part will be stripped since there is no preexisting record. As a result, a direct visit will be recorded, and you will have a bigger problem than the one you started with since. You will still have spam, and direct visits are harder to track.
When people see that the bounce rate changes drastically because of the spam, they start worrying about the impact that it will have on their rankings in the SERPs.
This is another mistake commonly made. With or without spam, Google doesn’t take into consideration Google Analytics metrics as a ranking factor. Here is an explanation about this from Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s web spam team.
And if you think about it, Cutts’ explanation makes sense; because although many people have GA, not everyone uses it.
Another common concern when people see strange landing pages coming from spam on their reports is that they have been hacked.
The page that the spam shows on the reports doesn’t exist, and if you try to open it, you will get a 404 page. Your site hasn’t been compromised.
But you have to make sure the page doesn’t exist. Because there are cases (not spam) where some sites have a security breach and get injected with pages full of bad keywords to defame the website.
Now that we’ve discarded security issues and their effects on rankings, the only thing left to worry about is your data. The fake trail that the spam leaves behind pollutes your reports.
It might have greater or lesser impact depending on your site traffic, but everyone is susceptible to the spam.
Small and midsize sites are the most easily impacted – not only because a big part of their traffic can be spam, but also because usually these sites are self-managed and sometimes don’t have the support of an analyst or a webmaster.
Big sites with a lot of traffic can also be impacted by spam, and although the impact can be insignificant, invalid traffic means inaccurate reports no matter the size of the website. As an analyst, you should be able to explain what’s going on in even in the most granular reports.
Usually it is recommended to add the referral to an exclusion filter after it is spotted. Although this is useful for a quick action against the spam, it has three big disadvantages.
Luckily, there is a good way to prevent all these problems. Most of the spam (ghost) works by hitting GA’s random tracking-IDs, meaning the offender doesn’t really know who is the target, and for that reason either the hostname is not set or it uses a fake one. (See report below)
You can see that they use some weird names or don’t even bother to set one. Although there are some known names in the list, these can be easily added by the spammer.
On the other hand, valid traffic will always use a real hostname. In most of the cases, this will be the domain. But it also can also result from paid services, translation services, or any other place where you’ve inserted GA tracking code.
Based on this, we can make a filter that will include only hits that use real hostnames. This will automatically exclude all hits from ghost spam, whether it shows up as a referral, keyword, or pageview; or even as a direct visit.
To create this filter, you will need to find the report of hostnames. Here’s how:
You will see a list of all hostnames, including the ones that the spam uses. Make a list of all the valid hostnames you find, as follows:
For small to medium sites, this list of hostnames will likely consist of the main domain and a couple of subdomains. After you are sure you got all of them, create a regular expression similar to this one:
yourmaindomain\.com|anotheruseddomain\.com|payingservice\.com|translatetool\.com
You don’t need to put all of your subdomains in the regular expression. The main domain will match all of them. If you don’t have a view set up without filters, create one now.
Then create a Custom Filter.
Make sure you select INCLUDE, then select “Hostname” on the filter field, and copy your expression into the Filter Pattern box.
You might want to verify the filter before saving to check that everything is okay. Once you’re ready, set it to save, and apply the filter to all the views you want (except the view without filters).
This single filter will get rid of future occurrences of ghost spam that use invalid hostnames, and it doesn’t require much maintenance. But it’s important that every time you add your tracking code to any service, you add it to the end of the filter.
Now you should only need to take care of the crawler spam. Since crawlers access your site, you can block them by adding these lines to the .htaccess file:
## STOP REFERRER SPAM RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt\.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} buttons-for-website\.com [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F]
It is important to note that this file is very sensitive, and misplacing a single character it it can bring down your entire site. Therefore, make sure you create a backup copy of your .htaccess file prior to editing it.
If you don’t feel comfortable messing around with your .htaccess file, you can alternatively make an expression with all the crawlers, then and add it to an exclude filter by Campaign Source.
Implement these combined solutions, and you will worry much less about spam contaminating your analytics data. This will have the added benefit of freeing up more time for you to spend actually analyze your valid data.
After stopping spam, you can also get clean reports from the historical data by using the same expressions in an Advance Segment to exclude all the spam.
If you still need more information to help you understand and deal with the spam on your GA reports, you can read my main article on the subject here: http://www.ohow.co/what-is-referrer-spam-how-stop-it-guide/.
Additional information on how to stop spam can be found at these URLs:
In closing, I am eager to hear your ideas on this serious issue. Please share them in the comments below.
(Editor’s Note: All images featured in this post were created by the author.)
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