Small business web analytics 'likely' infected with spam

5 July 2016

Most New Zealand small business web analytics 'likely' infected with spam

A New Zealand Google partner company is warning that the web analytics of most SME websites in this country have likely had their analytics numbers manipulated by spam traffic.

CEO of Google Adwords certified partner Ark Advance, Chris Price, said that every single website his company has worked with in the last year had their Google Analytics account infected by the referral spam, which distorts the website's traffic reports.

"The people who are doing this will use software to dump rubbish data into your Google Analytics account as referral spam. Infection rates may be as high as 90 per cent or more here in New Zealand," he said.

The referral spam creates two problems for website owners.

"If you go into your Google Analytics account you will see that there are a few 'sites' that are referring a tremendous amount of traffic to your website. You may be tempted to click on the link to see who they are, and that's when you end up being referred to a spam website – with all the inherent risks, like an infection from malicious malware.

"The other problem is that your data is distorted. You may think that your website is doing great, so you don't need to make any fixes or improvements when in fact your site is performing poorly," he said.

There are two ways to identify that your website analytics may have been affected by referral spam:

1. If your website attracts less than 1000 users per month and your website bounce rate is between 80 - 90%. A reasonable bounce rate should be between 20 and 40 per cent.

2. Under the heading 'Acquisition', click on 'Referrals'. Look for oddly named referral site links that originate offshore.

"This has been going on for a couple of years, and they do it because they want you to click on the link out of curiosity. Perhaps for a website receiving a million hits a day it is insignificant, but to a small business website in New Zealand, it is certainly disruptive.

"Websites represent a significant investment for some companies who need them to do their job. But when you can't understand the numbers, because they're being distorted, it undercuts all the money and work that has gone into that website."

Mr Price said there are a few fixes, but the easiest solution was not to click on the spam links and to customise the analytics report so that you only see results for New Zealand – in other words, filter out overseas results.

"Of course, this only works if you are interested in local traffic, which I think is true of most SMEs. Any other fixes are fairly technical and will require some expertise," he said.

For more information, visit www.arkadvance.com

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