I have recently started listing on Folksy and set up Google Analytics. Over half of the visits to my page are from two cities in Russia and clearly aren’t genuine. I have also started to get spam Google emails. How do I stop this from happening?? It is very annoying both in terms of the emails and the fact that it is screwing up my data!
Georgina, you cannot stop them but if you can figure out their IP number you can go into Analytics and block them. I am afraid if they are the same ones that “visit” me they change their address. They are just robots. They will not do anything but annoy. When you drill down in GA, just exclude their visits or sessions from your total.
Wish you luck.
Regards,
Leslie
Thanks Leslie, very new to all of this so will work out how to exclude them. I assume that there is a direct connection between these page visits and the spam.
You’re welcome. I don’t believe that the emails and connected with these visitors. I did some research on it - Google the domain name - and you will be able to see who and what they do is mostly information gathering from those they have targeted and are harmless. You may get a different answer regarding the emails from someone much more computer savvy than I.
I know its nice to think we are getting lots of visits from lovely people genuinely interested in our work but sadly many views are not genuine and even those that are don’t always generate a sale. I know I often visit an item that has caught my eye just to admire it and find out more about it and the maker without any intention of buying it. I rarely look at my page view numbers as at the end of the day its sales I’m interested in and I get notified of those. The only time I really use GA is if I want to see if a particular promotion had any effect or to try and find out where traffic to my page is coming from rather than to track the number of views.
Those “dodgy” Russian views could well be a search engine crawling through your page, just like Google does.
Keep an eye out for dodgy german visits as well, most days ‘someone’ in Munich looks at one of my pairs of earrings.
If you’re looking at GA the false Russian views you’re seeing are probably generated by the ‘darodar’ forum. They’re not real views at all and whilst irritating as they confuse your stats, they are otherwise harmless. In the end, as Roz says, it’s sales that are important, not views.
On the other hand, I have sold something to a Russian buyer in the past…
This has been going on for months now for me. The Russian views stopped for a while just after Christmas but are back and numerous as ever now! A bit annoying but they do seem to be harmless.
Thanks, as long as they are harmless that is all I care about. I was worried that they were somehow accessing and using my data as I had started getting the spam at the same time when I had none before. As a new user and new to the selling world it is of interest to me that people are finding my page so, whilst sales are important, my work is on the expensive side of Folksy so I don’t expect views to mean sales on a regular basis. Oh and I was never implying Russians were dodgy just that the views weren’t genuine, though Putin could improve his gay rights.