Google Analytics Event Tracking Spam: Event-Tracking.com

Two days ago I noticed an unusual category in our Events report in Google Analytics:

“to use this feature visit: EVENT-TRACKING.COM”

Google Analytics Event Tracking Spam

It certainly wasn’t something we’d set up, and just yesterday the number of times this “event” occurred had a substantial increase, so I did a little searching for an explanation. Fortunately the issue wasn’t unique to just us – others had begun to see the same and the consensus across the Moz and Google forums is that it’s Event spam (similar to Referral Traffic spam).

It doesn’t appear to be malicious, but we’ll be monitoring just in case.

From a reporting perspective, options include:

  • Chalk it up to spam and don’t count it in your reporting
  • Create a filter by hostname – either one that excludes the spammer, or one that includes only your hostname

Much like we’ve seen with referral spam in Google Analytics, this seems to be the next muddying of data. Be aware of it, and if we find out anything else we’ll post an update!

Here’s a link to the Moz forum about the topic