Should I worry about bots flooding my GA?

Every now and then you'll see some odd things in your analytics. One time there was a spike in "traffic" of 500x coming from one place. Unfortunately that place was a spam site and all of the traffic was fake.

Or you'll see referring sites that sound like an ad. e.g. get-more-traffic-to-your-shopify-store.com

The vast majority of this spam isn't from bots or anyone attacking your website.

It's from people exploiting a flaw in Google Analytics.

The code to "install" GA is the same thing for every website. The only difference is an id associated with your website. What they don't tell you is that anyone can install that code anywhere, even on a fake website with a fake domain. Load the page 1,000 times and now your analytics have been polluted by 1,000 "fake" visits.

Google does provide a way to workaround this but it doesn't stop or block it. It just changes your reports in GA to filter out the fake traffic.

That said, though the junk referrals are annoying to you, it does nothing to your SEO or Shopify store. Those people aren't even loading your store for those visits, they just randomly entered your GA id code.

Their hope is that you'd think the traffic was legitimate, see their site name and buy some shady product. If you didn't know any better, seeing someone send you 100x you regular traffic in one day would make you want more and more traffic every day, right? All for the low, low price of $197. 🫠

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Short of getting national/international news, you're unlikely to see unexpected spikes in traffic. SEO and traffic generation in general takes months and it's a slow process of getting better and better over time.

So are spikes of traffic from bots something to worry about? Not really.

Is there anything you can do to stop them? No, you can just make it easier for you to ignore them.