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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.
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.
If you are trading Internationally, looking to have a website developed or your business marketed online, 50% match funding is available for our services as part of the Digital Supply Partners Programme.
CIM / UKTI Accredited International Digital Marketing Supplier
Crescent Digital Ltd are formerly accredited and recognised by UK Trade & Investment and the Digital Marketplace, supporting business growth through selling online.
This programme Is In partnership with Peninsula Enterprise & UK Trade & Investment
The Digital Supply Partners programme is designed and delivered by the CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing)
The Digital Marketplace is part of the City Deal programme delivered by Peninsula Enterprise
Applying is simple. Eligibilty criteria is for businesses based in Devon, Cornwall & Somerset. Please contact us to find out more.
WordPress is a great platform for building websites and we’ve had some great results SEO’ing WordPress installations. However, straight out of the box, its not perfect, but can be improved.
Page Load Times
Search engines such as Google put much emphasis on usability and if visitors are bouncing back out of your site after being frustrated waiting for pages or images to load, that sends a really bad signal to them, meaning your site will likely get pushed down the results.
I’ve seen some really slow sites, but typical WordPress sites on cheap, shared web hosting with (too many) plugins, tend to have load times IRO of 3-4 seconds (too slow). You want less than 2 seconds minimum with a target of below 1 second, and this is what you need to consider:
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