Executive Summary Report - Non-Relevant Top Performing Search Terms

The Executive Summary Report provides an overview of your client's campaign performance. If Google Analytics has been properly integrated into the dashboard, your report will show a number of key performance metrics that may be valuable for the client: organic traffic, click through rate, top performing search terms, keyword ranking, etc. 

Top Performing Search Terms

The Top Performing Search Terms section gives you insights into which keywords or phrases people use to get to your client’s website. You want to ensure that the terms appearing in this report are the ones you want to be associated with your client’s website. Every now and then, you may see terms that are not relevant to their business. An example might be “www.share-button.xyz” or "sharebutton.to." What are these and what should you do?

Referral Spam

Sharebutton.to is a referral spam or ghost spam that targets Google Analytics accounts with fake traffic and keywords. While it does not affect the site’s rankings negatively and poses no direct harm to the campaign, the visits they make are using server resources which can affect the website’s load time. We recommend filtering/blocking this in Google Analytics. 

How to Stop Referral Spam

The first thing you need to remember is to NOT visit the site. That is their goal - to get you to visit the URL to purchase services or products from them and in some cases, there might be malware on the page that could harm your computer. 

You can block the spam referrers from accessing the site via the .htaccess file in the root directory of the domain or by setting up filters in Google Analytics. Contact your project manager, have the Google Analytics credentials ready, and we’ll help sort this out for you.

Please bear in mind that there's no proactive way to avoid these from popping back up from time to time, because there are entities who really just like creating Referral and Ghost Spam.