I set up a small business website which is only displaying informations about the offered services and some contact informations. It is not interactive at all and no user is enabled to submit any data. We are now monitoring the visits and pis with the tools offered by google. Since the first days after the going public we are observing a lot of ips from places in the world we have absolutely no relation to (like Russia, China, Brazil, even some african states...). Also the overall number of visits is much higher than we expected. Now I'm wondering where these "exotic" visitors may come from. And if this is some kind of attack we should be aware of and protect somehow. Does anybody know what might be happening here?
This is a common situation, Websites with the default Google Analytics tracking code like UA-XXXXXXX-1 have been receiving attacks from what is known as "Ghost referrals". These ghosts are often coming from Russia through different sources such as forum.topic59010277.darodar.com, humanorightswatch.org, o-o-6-o-o.com and s.click.aliexpress.com.
Most recently I have noticed another source simple-share-buttons.com coming from different countries like USA, China, Finland, Singapore and Argentina.
They distort metrics like bounce rate and session duration. Google might deliver a solution soon, meanwhile you can use view-filters to block them from appearing in your GA reports.
Create a filter that only excludes ghosts from your view. Go to your view and set up the Filter as follow:
Check the tld (com, net, co, etc) of the spammer* and change it accordantly inside the regex. *Find the list of spammers in Google Analytics in the Acquisition>All Traffic>Referrals report (You will need to monitor this section just in case new spammers arrive)