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.

Types of spam

The spam in Google Analytics can be categorized by two types: ghosts and crawlers....more

Source: Carlos Escalera, YouMoz