Google Analytics Freakiness

Today I checked my google analytics, and over the weekend I had a significant amount of "not set" traffic to both my Shapeways shop and my Ontogenie website, but interestingly not to my scientific animation website. This has never happened before (usually just one or two visits from a "not set" country or "not set" city, if any.) I realize there are perfectly legitimate ways to roam around the internet anonymously, but this kind of makes me nervous. Has anyone else experienced this? Should I be worried? Or should I just chalk it up to normal traffic to my sites and be happy?

Kimberly

me too - not quite sure what it is, I just wish they would stop and buy something!!

I did some digging, and it turns out this is what is called 'referral spam'...mine is coming from two 'ghost' websites called simple-share-buttons.com and buttons-for-website.com. They are not actual visits to your site, and so they end up skewing your GA statistics. You can find your referrals by looking at Acquisition>All Traffic>Referrals, and reading the source column. I've read a couple of explanations of how to filter out this traffic, and it's not at all straight-forward. Instead of filtering out the offenders directly, you have to tell Google Analytics which referrals would be legitimate, and if your site hasn't been up for long, you probably don't have an extensive history of what the legitimate referrals are. You may also need to filter out 'spammy web crawlers.' Oh, and on closer inspection, I realized these weird referrals were only happening on my personal Ontogenie website, not on my Shapeways shop. Sigh. Anyway, here are a couple of places to read up on a solution:

http://viget.com/advance/removing-referral-spam-from-google- analytics]
https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals- and-other-google-analytics-spam]