Last month we reported that Google appeared to have finally managed to filter out the referral spam that was flooding Analytics with fake traffic. And there was a general rejoicing amongst Analytics analysts and data people, because they’d been complaining about it for a long time.
Did We Speak Too Soon?
In that last little article letting everybody know that the problem had finally been resolved, we finished off with a rhetorical question. Namely whether the spammers would figure out how to bypass the filters that Google appeared to have put in place.
Well, rhetorical or not, it looks like we have an answer. And the answer appears to be “Yes.”
From what we can see, it looks like the filters worked for less than two months, if reports of the spam disappearing in February are accurate. We started picking it up again in early April. So here we go again.
We’ll be keeping an eye on it. Maybe Google will update their filters and it’ll disappear again.