Stop santasgift.ml referral traffic in Google Analytics
Santasgift.ml is a referrer spam URL that hits your website with fake referral traffic known as ghost traffic. Ghost traffic never lands on your website but it infiltrates you Google Analytics data with fraudulent referral traffic in order to promote websites it forwards to. If you are affected by santasgift.ml referrer spam you will notice an increase in referral traffic from the URL mixed into your Google Analytics data even though santasgift.ml referral traffic never actually landed on your website. Referrer spam is not essentially harmful to your website and it’s appearance in Google search results pages; However, referrer spam can ruin your website’s analytical data and be quite a nuisance. If your website’s appropriate data is important to you then you will want to block santasgift.ml by creating an exclude filter which I explain below.
Santasgift.ml referrer spam and referrer spam in general from other URLs like copyrightclaims.org is a growing problem for webmasters, website owners, and anyone who values their website’s appropriate analytical data. New spam URLs seem to appear daily. Referrer spam can ruin website data measured by Google Analytics. The website data it can affect includes everything measured in Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior reports by Google Analytics. For example, santasgift.ml referrer spam can interfere with your bounce rate because the spam URL typically lands on a single webpage on your website and leaves your website from the same webpage. Referrer spam can also hit your website from sources around the world, from various resources, and more.
Quick Links
What is Santasgift.ml?
Santasgift.ml is a referrer spam URL used to make it look like referral traffic hit your website from different locations around the world. The URLforwards to a questionable online store called AliExpress. AliExpress is a notorious referrer spammer and owns the domains used to forward to it. There are hundreds of domains suspected to forward to the online store. The santasgift.ml domain name is used to make it look like referral traffic hit your website from different locations around the world.
The downside to unwanted Santasgift.ml referral traffic for website owners is that it can ruin 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.
Santasgift.ml 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 Santasgift.ml referral traffic in Google Analytics
This guide shows you how to block santasgift.ml referral traffic in Google Analytics by creating an exclude filter that targets the campaign source.
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 Santasgift.ml or the URL 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 santasgift.ml and click the blue Save button on the bottom of the webpage. To add more than one URL make a Filter Pattern similar to this: santasgift.ml | example.com | example.com | example.com
