Excluding fake traffic from your GA account

⚠️Warning! 
This article applies to the previous version of Google Analytics, Universal Analytics (UA). Google will sunset that version of GA from July 2023. We advise you to migrate to the latest version, GA4. Learn how to set up GA4 for FlippingBook Publisher, and how you can analyze your flipbooks.  By design, GA4 is much better protected against fake traffic so you should not need any additional measures as described below for UA.

Unfortunately, spam is a fact of life nowadays and it will even show up in your GA reports, obfuscating your data. Google Analytics knows which account to put the data in because of the unique UA number that is added to your webpages (and your FlippingBooks are in essence just that — webpages). But that means that ANY page with Google Analytics code and your UA number will be able to put data into your account. This is not limited to just your own pages! Spammers abuse this to sneak their domain names into your reports. Another trick is to actually open your pages with automated bots, and then hope you look back on where all that traffic comes from.

Depending on the amount of traffic that you get, the percentage of fake traffic can range from marginal to very high. While it is very time consuming to get 100% clean data, it is very easy to remove 98% of the spammers, by filtering your data. We will show you how to create 2 filters, that

• filter by hostname (i. e. removing data where your GA account is used, but not on your site) and
• filter by screen resolution (automated bots have no screen, so the screen resolution almost always equals «not set»).

To create these filters log in to your Google Analytics account at https://analytics.google.com and:

• Click on Admin menu in the lower-left corner of the page
• Click on Filters in the column View — All Website data
  
• Click on Add filter

To filter by hostname do the following:

• In the Filter Name, type Hostname
• Click on the button Select Filter Type and change it to Include Only
• Click on the button Select source or destination and change it to traffic to the hostname
• Click on the button Select expressions and change it to that contain
• If you use FlippingBook Cloud then type cld.bz in the Hostname text field. Use your own server name if you host on your own webserver

• Click on Verify this filter
• Click Save and you will be redirected back to the Filters menu

After that, you can filter by the screen resolution:

• Click on Add filter
• In the Filter Name, type Screen Resolution
• Click on the button Custom
• Click on the dropdown menu Select field and select the Screen Resolution option
• In the text field Filter Pattern type ^\(not set\)$
• Click Save

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