These instructions are for Universal Analytics only. Referral spam is less of a problem these days (2022 onwards) and in Google Analytics 4, which Etsy now supports.
If you’re here, you’ve probably noticed something weird going on in your Google Analytics reports. And if you haven’t noticed anything weird, follow along and you might get a surprise.
Analytics can usually tell you, very precisely, where your visitors came from, both geographically and on the web. As you’ll find out in future posts, that’s tricky to get right when you run an Etsy shop, but there’s one problem that almost every site has these days: referral spam.
“Referral spam” is when useless, fake or malicious websites show up as having sent traffic to your site. They haven’t. At least not real people visitors.
This article might be useful to you when analysing historical data from your Universal Analytics account, after you back it up.
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