Is it possible to Spoof Analytics to give false Unique Visitor Data for Site A to Site B
-
Hi,
We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc.
The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them.
As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent.
The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is
1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it).
2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors).
Many thanks in advance
-
You might be better with a server side tracker like http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
The answer from Mat probably has the best logic, but the only problem is are you legally responsible for mitigating the possibility of fraud?
I would make sure you add this to the contract, as I am not sure you are going to be able to defeat a proxy or spoofer, just in case the referrer gets smart and decides to work the system.
An anti fraud system can be put into place, but LOL I am not sure you will have the access to the multi million dollar fraud monitoring tools that Google does, that are contstantly updated and algorithmically and systematically monitor as well as have auditors who manually do random checks...
-
Hi - Well we are really just acting on behalf of the client - that's what they want.
Also its only visitors from that specific website (very close niche) - not just any site
-
Google Analytics doesn't report IP Address though - which is another reason to take a different root. Not knocking GA, I love it. However it isn't the right tools for this.
I suspect that the fiverr gigs use ping or something the create the mass of "unique visits". Very easy to spot. Unless you have some fairly sophisticated tools to hand i'd imagine that any method that can deliver 5000 for $5 is going to be pretty easy to spot.
Might try it now though. I love fiverr for testing stuff
-
If you must use Analytics, I would drill down to the source of referral within analytics. This will give you the URL, page, or whatever. I think you can also drill down to the referring IP etc...
You need to log were they come from through them. Export your results every month and see a pattern.
If you get 500 referrals from website B's IP or URL, then its a sure way of knowing they are throwing people at you.
But Mats answer is best, will give you times, not just dates and will also give you more detailed info.
-
My question is: is unique visitors the right metric that you should be measuring? On Fiverr.com I can get 2000 to 10,000 unique visitors for $5. http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?query=unique+visitors&x=0&y=0
Can you tie your metrics to something else that might have more value for you, such as purchases, newsletter signups (still easy to fake, but at least takes a little more time), etc?
-
Google Analytics isn't designed to pull the data in the way you really want to for something like this. It can be done I suppose, but it'd be hard work.
There are only so many metrics you can measure, and all are pretty easy to fake. However having the data is an easy to access form means that you can spot patterns and behaviour, which are much harder to fake.
Probably a starting point would be to measure distribution of the various metrics on the referred traffic v the general trend. If one particular C class block (or user agent, or resolution, or operating system, or whatever) appeared at a different frequency in the paid traffic that would be a good place to look deeper.
Thinking less technically for a moment though, I bet you could just implement one of the many anti click fraud systems to do most of this for you. same idea, but someone else has already done the coding. Googling for click fraud brings up a stack of ads (tempting to click them loads and set off their alarms!!).
-
Hi Mat,
A very informative answer.
If someone is going to try and spoof analytics, then would they not also be able to equally try and fool the script?
If someone was to try this do you know how they would likely try and do it - essentially if I know what is likely to be tried, then I can work out something that could counteract it. Are there certain things that can't be fooled, or are very difficult to fool ? - EG things like browser resolution, location etc - or are this just as easy to spoof as anything else?
many thanks
-
It isn't hard to fake this at all I am afraid. Spotting it will depend on how sophisticated the person doing it is.
My personal preference would be not to use analytics as the means of counting it. Doing that you are going to be slightly limited in the metrics you have available and will always be "correcting" data and looking for problems rather than measuring more correctly and having problems spotted.
I'd have a script on page that logs that checks for a referrer and it if matches the pattern for website B creates a log record instead.
You then have the ability to set your rules. For instance if you get 2 referrals from the same IP a second apart would you count them? What about 10 per hour 24 hours a day? You can also log the exact timestamp with whatever variables you want to collect, so each click from the referring site might be recorded as:
- Time stamp
- Exact referring URL
- User agent
- IP
- Last visit (based on cookie)
- Total visits (based on cookie)
- #pages viewed (updating cookie on subsequent page views )
- and so on
Analytics doesn't give you access to the data in quite the same way. I'd definitely want to be logging it myself if the money involved is reasonable.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Redirecting Ecommerce Site
Hi I'm working on a big site migration I'm setting up redirects for all the old categories to point to the new ones. I'm doing this based on relevancy, the categories don't match up exactly but I've tried to redirect to the most relevant alternative. Would this be the right approach?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Ajax tabs on site
Hello, On a webpage I have multiple tabs, each with their own specific content. Now these AJAX/JS tabs, if Google only finds the first tab when the page loads the content would be too thin. What do you suggest as an implementation? With Google being able to crawl and render more JS nowadays, but they deprecated AJAX crawling a while back. I was maybe thinking of doing a following implementation where when JS is disabled, the tabs collapse under each other with the content showing. With JS enabled then they render as tabs. This is usually quite a common implementation for tabbed content plugins on Wordpress as well. Also, Google had commented about that hidden/expandable content would count much less, even with the above JS fix. Look forward to your thoughts on this. Thanks, Conrad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conalt1 -
Keyword phrase for entire site
Hey everyone! I'm fairly new to SEO but I have a large number of sites I'm needing to SEO. I'm a tad confused as to how many keyword phrases I should use throughout my site. For example, my site is www.uluru.travel. I want to rank highlight for the phrase 'uluru tours' throughout the site, as many of my pages list uluru tours and people searching for this phrase are my type of customers. As you can see I've tried to do some basic on page SEO for that phrase by including it in page title, headings etc. But the entire site doesn't seem to rank very well. Would you guys suggest trying to target 'uluru tours' phrase throughout the entire site of just focus a couple of pages on this term? Any advice is greatly appreciated guys! Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mysites0 -
Business Listing sites SEO
How websites like justdial, askme, indiamart, tradeindia do their search engine optimization? Is it different from normal seo? please help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Site wide links removal
A website of mine has about 4,000 backlinks of which 2,500 of them are coming from one website to the homepage and about 6 internal pages. These have been built up over about 5 years, mainly via article posts. The site was recently hit via penguin 2.0 but has only had natural links built so i'm wondering if the sitewide links are in fact the issue? The website linking to mine is an authority source within its niche but the concern is the amount of backlinks coming from this one site and if it may now be seen as having a negative impact. When ive reviewed the links from this one site via a backlink removal tool about 80% seem fine and suggestions are to remove about 20% of the backlinks. Would you keep all the sitewide backlinks or remove them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide
Have you come across a similar situation and how did it affect ranking/traffic?0 -
Site revamp for neglected site - modifying site structure, URLs and content - is there an optimal approach?
A site I'm involved with, www.organicguide.com, was at one stage (long ago) performing reasonably well in the search engines. It was ranking highly for several keywords. The site has been neglected for some considerable period of time. A new group of people are interested in revamping the site, updating content, removing some of the existing content, and generally refreshing the site entirely. In order to go forward with the site, significant changes need to be made. This will likely involve moving the entire site across to wordpress. The directory software (edirectory.com) currently being used has not been designed with SEO in mind and as a result numerous similar pages of directory listings (all with similar titles and descriptions) are in google's results, albeit with very weak PA. After reading many of the articles/blog posts here I realize that a significant revamp and some serious SEO work is needed. So, I've joined this community to learn from those more experienced. Apart from doing 301 redirects for pages that we need to retain, is there any optimal way of removing/repairing the current URL structure as the site gets updated? Also, is it better to make changes all at once or is an iterative approach preferred? Many thanks in advance for any responses/advice offered. Cheers MacRobbo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | macrobbo0 -
What to do when unique content is out of the question?
SEO companies/people are always stating that unique, quality content is one of the best things for SEO... But what happens when you can't do that? I've got a movie trailer blog and of late a lot of movie agencies are now asking us to use the text description they give us along with the movie trailer. This means that some pages are going to have NO unique content. What do you do in a situation like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor0 -
Duplicate content on ecommerce sites
I just want to confirm something about duplicate content. On an eCommerce site, if the meta-titles, meta-descriptions and product descriptions are all unique, yet a big chunk at the bottom (featuring "why buy with us" etc) is copied across all product pages, would each page be penalised, or not indexed, for duplicate content? Does the whole page need to be a duplicate to be worried about this, or would this large chunk of text, bigger than the product description, have an effect on the page. If this would be a problem, what are some ways around it? Because the content is quite powerful, and is relavent to all products... Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode0