Not every “visitor” in your analytics is a real person with a brew and a question. Some are bots, scrapers or referrers that never even lay eyes on your pages.
Spam traffic shows up as sudden spikes, bizarre sources and sessions that vanish in seconds. But what’s really going on here?
Automation is everywhere
Scripts and crawlers sweep the web to harvest data, probe vulnerabilities or inflate someone else’s ad revenue. That constant background hum of non-human activity seeps into your reports whether you invited it or not, so always treat unexplained surges with healthy suspicion.
“Ghost” and referral spam
You can receive hits that bypass your site entirely. Bad actors send fake events straight into your analytics property or spoof referrers so they appear as sessions. The classic symptoms are 0-second visits, impossible engagement and nonsense domains that keep reappearing.
Configuration gaps magnify the mess
Loose settings make small problems loud. If bot filtering is off, hostnames are not validated, or UTMs are full of junk data. A common giveaway is a flood of “direct” traffic to one landing page at odd hours from the same device and user agent.
How to clean it up
Turn on bot filtering and block obvious junk. Validate hostnames and keep an “allowlist”. Track quality outcomes such as verified emails or booked calls, not just form fires, and add a simple user-agent or client-ID dimension so you can isolate patterns and exclude them going forward.
You can also set an alert for sudden spikes so you can investigate before the noise spreads.
Not sure where to start?
If you want clean data you can trust and a plan that protects your ad spend and reporting, get in touch with Engage Web. We can audit, fix and harden your setup, then align it with AI-powered SEO (search engine optimisation) services that focus on qualified traffic, not ghost visits.
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