This is great news for anyone who uses Google Analytics.

Spam traffic in Google Analytics has always been an annoying issue for digital marketers. Referral spam works like this: there are spammers out there that send out bots to crawl websites. Those bots are then included in your traffic data in Google Analytics for your website. These non-human bots skew important traffic metrics for the website with artificial visits.

Google has been aware of the issue and has been promising a fix for quite some time. They once added a “Filter known bots” button that didn’t really do too much.

So we marketers had to use workarounds. We had to manually create spam filters to filter out the spam referral traffic that was skewing our clients’ actual data. Basically when a new spammer would appear, we’d have to manually create a filter to get rid of that specific source. It was a colossal pain and time-waster.

But it looks like Google has finally fixed the issue.

I recently check our Google Analytics, and the data in our standard views for our clients matched our “Spam Filters” views. Upon more digging, I realized that many of the bots that typically plague the data, for instance traffic2cash.org, adf.ly, and free-social-buttons.xyz (don’t click on these links) are gone.

Personally, I’m thrilled that this update has been made. Well-done, Google!