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Over the past 18 months, the problems with polluted data in Google Analytics caused by spam domains such as AliBestSale.com are increasingly causing problems. Typically, they’ll show an increase in traffic, but mostly 100% bounce rates. This means that if you’re an agency, clients initially think that they’re receiving a healthy increase in visitors, but for some reason, visitors aren’t sticking on site.
If you’re a newbie to this, a brief explainer:
your website is not actually receiving this traffic
this does not mean your website has been hacked
spammers pollute your statistics with their domains in order to promote their domains
the actual traffic involved is automated bots hitting web servers – not real people
One of the problems we typically find is after successfully removing spam data from Google data, website traffic appears to decline, although it never was real, human traffic, so we carefully explain what is happening.
Alibestsale.com
What alibestsale.com are doing slightly differently to the other spammers is in instead of spoofing referral traffic from a domain, it appears that they are using site’s (yours, mine and our clients) Google Analytics code in their website’s pages in order to make it look like they’re sending traffic to this page.
Google Certified Partners
Crescent Digital are trained by, work with & have access to Google assistance and account management.
This will show up in your Google Analytics data as a Page Title AliBestSale.com being a popular page on your site as below:
How To Filter AliBestSale.com
In Google Analytics, go to:
Admin
Filters
Add Filter
Enter Filter Name
Choose Custom
Select ‘Page Title’ as ‘Filter Field’
Enter ‘AliBestSale\.com’ as Filter Pattern
Verify
Save
Below Is A Screenshot of how to set-up and test the filter.
Crescent Digital Ltd successfully tidied up Google Analytics data and configured purposeful management reports for our clients. If you would like us to perform this service for your business, please get in touch.
About Us
Crescent Digital are specialists in growing revenue using digital marketing through consultancy, training and execution. We are accredited by the CIM and formally approved as a service provider for the UKTI for International Digital Marketing.
We’d love to hear your feedback on this – please add you comments below and thanks for reading.
In a #FF (Follow Friday) way of providing some thank you’s, we thought we’d give out a bit of link love and provide names and links of tools that we use and love for managing search engine marketing:
SEMRush – this is becoming our go-to tool for all things search related. Firstly, it’s great at analysing other sites traffic to which we don’t have access – great for potential clients and competitors analysis. For competitor analysis, we can view what keywords are working for them, their backlinks and trends over time. But here is what sets it apart – the AdWords analysis is fantastic for evaluating AdWords campaigns of your competitors: everything down to downloading spreadsheets of their ad text, keywords bids, estimated traffic, including text and shopping ads.
For more, visit http://www.semrush.com/uk/
ScreamingFrog – for my tastes, ScreamingFrog feels a little ‘old school’ in terms of SEO. By this, I mean, it’s focus on titles, meta descriptions and alt tags. However, the paid version is great at spotting technical problems which may be preventing the SEO from being effective on the site. Fixing what you find in ScreamingFrog will not guarantee good SEO, but not addressing these problems will certainly compromise your SEO efforts.
For more: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/
Moz.com – I was using a subscription to Moz about decade ago when it was known as SEOMoz, but unsubscribed and it fell off my radar. However, since taking a paid subscription again 18 months ago, we haven’t looked back. It’s great at SEO analysis of your site, including authority, as we all know – not all sites or links are equal. The site audit’s can be a little over-zealous, but better safe than sorry.
For more, visit https://moz.com/
If I was stuck on a desert Island with only one tool, it would have to be SEMRush, purely due to the fact that it covers technical SEO, keyword , competitors and AdWords analysis.
More and more business websites are having home pages dominated by image sliders, also known as ‘carousels’. These have become increasingly common due to out of the box content management systems such as WordPress, with many themes including image slider plugins.
However, recent usability studies have indicated that using image sliders on your home page are a bad idea and many leading companies are now moving away from this design.
Below are some strong reasons why image sliders are a bad idea:
Image sliders can be mistaken for banners or banner advertising, which people have learnt to ignore. One study found that it’s more likely that you will survive a plane crash or win the lottery than click a banner ad.
The area where banners normally appear is the prime real estate of your site (the part of the home page that appears before scrolling). This is where your company should be presenting its USP’s and / or call–to-actions such as sign-ups.
The moving or sliding motion distracts visitors from other areas of the site.
Multiple large, high definition images can have a negative impact on page load speed, particularly is using entry-level, shared web hosting or the user is using a slower or heavily contended connection. A small increase in load time can negatively impact the visitor experience and adversely affect search engine performance.
Studies have shown that image sliders aren’t very effective, attracting at little as 1% of clicks.
What You Should Consider Instead
Usability studies have shown that website visitors make a sub-conscious decision whether they will stay on site and engage within 200ms of landing on one of your pages. Your website’s prime real estate should be the area where your business presents it’s USP’s, why visitors should engage with you (and not your competitors) and / or it’s call-to-actions, such email sign-ups.
More and more site owners have come to understand the importance of Google Analytics. However, the majority of people I come across are using it incorrectly and nearly all except the dedicated professionals, fail to understand its features and make it work to improve the marketing returns.
We’re big fans of GA (Google Analytics) at Crescent Digital because in particular, we can study the data to improve 2 fundamentals:
how to get more targeted visitors to the site
how to get more of those visitors to engage, purchase or inquire
In addition, if you’re using AdWords, I would class GA as essential.
The infographic below explains how you can use Google Analytics effectively to improve your marketing.
Crescent Digital Ltd. are officially recognised as a certified Google Partner.
This certification demonstrates proficiency in search advertising, including best practices for creating, managing and optimising AdWords search campaigns and means that we have access to the best resources available to get the most visibility for your website in Google and its partner sites.
What Does This Mean For Our Clients?
As partners, we are trained & work with Google & have access to Google assistance and account management. As a client, this means that you get to work with ourselves and Google in order attract visitors to your website and get them converting into paying clients. You’ll also be eligible to receive promotional credits.
Best Practices
High performance keeps our clients happy and improves our standing as a Google Partner. In order to attain & maintain Google certified Partner status, Crescent Digital have had to demonstrate high performance & best practices of our client accounts.
What Specialist Services Do We Offer?
Crescent Digital can train staff or operate as your outsourced digital marketing partner that operates as part of your main team in the following areas:
Thanks for the explaination. I did everything accordingly, and now waiting for the 24h to pass for it to show up in my Analytics. However, the small one-sentence confirmation is not appearing anymore, when someone fills in the contact form on our website. Could you please give some input on how to fix this?
Unfortunately not I’m afraid. It does vary with the type of activity and LinkedIn frequently change their policies, but at present, LinkedIn’s maximum is 30 days.
Regards
Steve
Hi there.thank you for your website
Is there any possibility to see all my updates in linkedin from the bigining?I had been linkedin member for about 3 years or so and .I had shared simething that I need it now and unfortunately I lose to have them any where else they were gone. I’d have been grateful if you can guide me
Many thanks
Crescent Digital are trained by, work with & have access to Google assistance and account management.
Verena
| #
Thanks for the explaination. I did everything accordingly, and now waiting for the 24h to pass for it to show up in my Analytics. However, the small one-sentence confirmation is not appearing anymore, when someone fills in the contact form on our website. Could you please give some input on how to fix this?
stevenba
| #
Unfortunately not I’m afraid. It does vary with the type of activity and LinkedIn frequently change their policies, but at present, LinkedIn’s maximum is 30 days.
Regards
Steve
N_jarolmasjed
| #
Hi there.thank you for your website
Is there any possibility to see all my updates in linkedin from the bigining?I had been linkedin member for about 3 years or so and .I had shared simething that I need it now and unfortunately I lose to have them any where else they were gone. I’d have been grateful if you can guide me
Many thanks