Dear fake users – who does Google think you are?

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    Summary

    Google Analytics is rife with Fake or Ghost referrers, this post takes a look at how Google itself classifies these users by Age, Sex, Interests etc

    Anyone with a website that uses Google Analytics must have noticed quite a bit of traffic coming from “Referrals”.

    Some of the sites, whose names keep changing every month, also seem to generate quite a bit of traffic for your websites.

    Sites such as site-auditor.online or fix-website-errors.com or free-social-buttons-aaa.xyz or any of such similar websites.

    The funny thing is that these sites don’t really refer any traffic to you (sorry for bursting your popularity bubble). They actually don’t even visit your site, they just tell Google that they did – simple.

    The sad part is that after all these years, Google with all its smarts and money hasn’t been able to curb this menace – who doesn’t like (fake) inflated numbers?

    Did we say Google had smarts? (oh yes we did) and part of those smarts they also have a “profile” of users that live on the Internet and visit sites all day. They know how old you are, what you like, your gender etc.

    We decided to analyze what Google knew about these fake users, so lets take a look from a data perspective.

    • Gender

      Predominantly Male

      Gender

    • Age

      Fairly young, assuming old people aren’t fake 😉

      Age

    • Affinity Categories (reach)

      Whatever this title means, the actual data is better self-explained

      Google Analytics Affinity Categories

    • In-market segment

      Not sure what that means

      In-market segments Google

    • Other Category

      Again – no idea

      1468500905

    • Top 10 Countries for our beloved fake users

      45.3% were from Russia (with love)

      Google Analytics Fake referrers

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