Definition
What is Referral Spam?
Referral spam is fake traffic that appears in analytics reports as visits from external websites but never actually visited your site. Spammers send fabricated hits to Google Analytics properties, making it appear as though traffic came from their domains. This inflates session counts, distorts engagement metrics, and contaminates audience data.
Why it matters
Referral spam corrupts analytics data, leading to flawed reporting and bad marketing decisions unless it is identified and filtered out systematically.