Unexpected Surge in Referral Website Traffic From Poland in Google Analytics
You may have noticed an unexpected surge in website traffic (referral traffic) from a list of unknown domains all originating from Poland. You may have noticed this unexpected increase in your Google Analytics dashboard and though that the big surge of traffic from Poland is attributed to your incredible SEO efforts.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case. And your devastation realizing that your site didn’t just get popular overnight is totally valid. You’re not alone. Many website owners have been hit with this spike in referral spam traffic and are feeling the burn. Although, a lot of us wanted to believe that the traffic is real, it’s not. The traffic spike you’re seeing in your GA4 analytics is indeed spam traffic from Poland.
How To See If Your Site Is Affected By Bot Traffic from Poland in GA4
If you want to be sure as to whether or not your site has also fallen victim to referral spam from Poland, here’s how you can sus it out.
Step 1. Check Your Google Analytics 4 Dashboard
Go to your Google Analytics dashboard. Navigate to the Reports tab. After that, go to Business Objectives > Generate Leads > Traffic Acquisition. Once you’re there, this is what it should look like:
Scroll down until you see the following:
Step 2. Check For Influx of Referral Traffic From The Following Domains
Now that you’re in the right place to check the referral traffic from Poland, we can move onto the next step of checking the referral website traffic. In the screenshot above, in the top left corner where it says “Session Primary… Channel Group”, click on that, then select “Session Source / Medium”. Once you click that, this is what you should see:
It should be a long list of unknown domains that don’t go anywhere. For example, if you search news.grets.store, you’ll go to an unsecured site that prompts you to verify yourself. This is what it looks like, which is super sketchy:
If you’re seeing the following domains in your referral traffic spike, unfortunately, you’ve fallen victim to this heinous and devastating circumstance:
- news.gret.store
- rida.tokyo
- kar.razas.site
- info.seders.website
- static.seders.website
- game.fertuk.site
- ofer.bartikus.site
- trast.mantero.online
- garold.dertus.site
- d132.bubble.is
How To Filter Spam Traffic from Poland in Google Analytics
Now that you know for sure that the sudden surge in referral traffic originating from Poland is not legitimate, here is a way you can filter out the analytics data coming from Poland so it doesn’t mess with your metrics:
Step 1. Go to your Google Analytics dashboard
Step 2. Navigate to Settings/Admin.
Step 3. Under “Admin” there should be a section called “Property Settings”. Under “Property Settings”, you’re looking for “Data Collection and Modification”. Under Data Collection and Modification, you want to navigate to “Data streams”.
Step 4. Once you’re in Data Streams, you want to click on/select the website you want to exclude the fake referral traffic from. Once you click your website, a window should slide into your dashboard and at the top it should read “Web stream details”.
Step 5. Find the section named “Google Tag”. Under that section, you want to find “Configure tag settings”. Click on that.
Step 6. Once you’re in your tag settings, there will be a section named “Settings” and an option at the bottom that says “Show more”. Click show more.
Step 7. Look for the “List unwanted referrals” option. Click on that. This is what it should look like:
What you want to do is enter every domain as its own “Condition” that is found in your referral traffic data to filter out these unwanted referrals.
This is what it should look like when you enter all those domains:
Step 8. Click Save at the top right and you’re done!
Need Extra Help with Managing Your Online Presence?
If you still can’t determine if the surge in traffic in Google Analytics is spam or not, feel free to contact us at SiteLaunchr.com and we can take a look, free of charge! Just send us a message through our Contact form and we’ll get to it for you.