Stop quit-smoking.ga referral traffic in Google Analytics
Quit-smoking.ga is one of the latest deceptive referrer spam URLs that targets your Google Analytics data with fake referral traffic in order to get you and other victims to visit the websites it forwards to and ultimately promotes. The spam URL currently forwards to a landing page for vaporizing equipment on an online smoke shop called heavengifts.com. The quit-smoking.ga referrer spam URL is similar to cyber-monday.ga which also forwards to the same website is owned by the same entity.
The quit-smoking.ga domain engages in the referrer spamming tactic in order to promote the website it forwards to. The way that quit-smoking.ga referrer spam works is that you will notice and increase in quit-smoking.ga referral traffic mixed into your Google Analytics data which may provoke you to visit the website and possibly shop in their online store.
Referrer spam is a blackhat SEO tactic and websites that engage in this tactic are always desperate and usually untrustworthy. The spammers disregard your website’s data in order to promote their content. We do not recommend the services provided by quit-smoking.ga and their affiliates.
Referrer spam has become a problem for many webmasters and website owners. Fraudulent referral traffic can ruin your website’s analytical data with referral traffic that never actually lands on your website, but instead targets your Google Analytics ID. The spam URL usually makes it look like it landed on a single webpage on your website and left from the same webpage which can mess up your bounce rate. This is not the only Google Analytics data that unwanted referral traffic can mess up. It can basically ruin everything reported in the Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior sections with useless data.
Luckily, we have created a guide to block and stop quit-smoking.ga referral spam in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter that targets the Campaign Source. This will stop quit-smoking.ga referrals from ruining your website’s appropriate data measured by Google Analytics.
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What is Quit-smoking.ga?
Quit-smoking.ga is a referrer spam URL that forwards to an online shop called heavengifts.com. Heavengifts.com owns the spam URL and others and uses spam URLs to attract potential customers. The entity behind the online business is notorious for utilizing the referrer spam tactic to generate potential customers and boost their search engine results.
The downside to unwanted www.quit-smoking.ga referral traffic for website owners is that it can mess up the appropriate Google Analytics data and other website metrics provided by third-party services. In some cases it can also use up your website’s bandwidth by creating repeated site requests. However, this is not the case with this URL since it primarily generates ghost hits that do not actually land on your website.
Spammers target the referral traffic of your website for several reasons:
- Referrer spammers want to promote a website and want you to visit the webpage or search for it online through Google search engine results pages.
- Referrer spammers want to boost their rank on Google search engine results pages by creating backlinks. They do this by logging requests into your website’s access log, which is then crawled by Google’s indexing bots and seen as a backlink to the spam site.
Quit-smoking.ga referrer spam is not entirely dangerous to your website. It will most likely not cause any trouble with how your website is accessed by your visitors or ranked by Google. However, in some cases referrer spam may use up your website’s bandwidth and CPU by creating multiple site requests to your website. In other cases, the spam URL is served to your analytical data by traffic bots which create ghost hits and never actually land on your website, which happens to be the case with this URL. They often target your GA ID number.
How to stop quit-smoking.ga referral traffic in Google Analytics
This guide shows you how to stop quit-smoking.ga referral spam in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter to block quit-smoking.ga referrers. You should also consider enabling the exclude all hits from known bots and spiders feature in Google Analytics to block traffic from known bad bots and crawlers.
1. Open your Google Analytics account and go to the Admin tab and click All Filters.
2. Click the ADD FILTER button to create a new exclude filter.
3. Add quit-smoking.ga or something you can remember as the Filter Name.
4. Select the Custom Filter Type.
5. In Filter Field, find and select Campaign Source in the list. In the Filter Pattern text box, add quit-smoking.ga and click the blue Save button on the bottom of the webpage. To add multiple address you can make a Filter Pattern similar to this: cyber-monday.ga | quit-smoking.ga | black-friday.ga
