We’ve talked about spam appearing in Analytics accounts before. We also talked about how Google appeared to have won that particular round, and removed the referral spam, only to have it sneakily re-appear only a month later.
Nothing really got said about it after that, but in the prelude to the thankfully just completed US elections, a new and unusual form of Analytics spam reared its ugly head.
In the language section of Analytics reports, some of our accounts started showing the previously unknown language referred to as “secret.google.com You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump!” (It should go without saying that you should not visit that URL.)
There’s a screenshot from one of our client Analytics accounts, clearly exhorting anybody who looks at their Analytics data to vote for Trump. Apparently, it originates from a Russian spam website, and as with previous Analytics spam (and due to the nature of website Analytics), there’s no way to remove it. You can write a filter to hide it from your reports, but that’s really about it.
And as questionable as this sort of spam might be in terms of effectiveness…well…Trump did win the election so…take from that what you will.*
*(Disclaimer: We very much doubt that Analytics spam had anything to do with his election victory.)