Going through your Google Analytics recently, did you notice an odd message in the language reporting section? Not a weird langauge, but an actual sentence endorsing Donald Trump for president?
You heard me right. Now you can’t even escape Trump even when diving deep into the data in you business intelligence product. Here’s the spam message that many GA users are seeing:
Secret.ɢoogle.com You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump!
How did this happen and should you be concerned? Searchify.ca does a good job explaining:
It’s a form of referral spam (also known as referrer spam, log spam or referrer bombing), a low-level form spamming where abusers try to add messages in Google Analytics, usually through the means of bots. Basically, these bots create a hyperlink to any of the pages of a website (usually the root domain) containing UTM-tags – the information that Google Analytics uses to know from which source, campaign, or referral a visitor came.
Great, thanks Stuart. I don’t care how I got gonorrhea, all I know is it burns and I just want to get rid of it. Can you just tell me how to get rid of the Trump spam ASAP? Geez, fine. Try this remedy. Unfortunately, this may only scrubs Trump from your analytics numbers but probably not from the White House, you know unless…