N m o d a l S o l u t i o n s I n c . A l l R i g h t s R e s e r v e d

Analytics Canvas Tutorial: Creating a Referral Spam Report

From a Template

Analytics Canvas Tutorial:

General User Interface Overview

N m o d a l S o l u t i o n s I n c . A l l R i g h t s R e s e r v e d

Overview Welcome to Analytics Canvas's tutorial on creating a referral spam

report from a template.

This tutorial is designed to give you an overview of creating reports,

and to touch on some high level concepts such as using templates,

running canvases, and creating a referral spam report in Excel.

Note This tutorial is aimed at users who have some Analytics Canvas

experience – i.e., the user is expected to be familiar with concepts

such as connecting to Google Analytics, and writing simple functions.

If you don’t have experience using Analytics Canvas, however, you

should still be able to follow along with the steps in this tutorial. In

you encounter problems, please refer to Analytic Canvas

documentation and Getting Started tutorials.

Cleaning Data in Three Steps We have prepared a referral traffic report for you, to simplify your

work in analyzing referral traffic and the effects of referral spam.

This report provides an overview of referral traffic to one of your

web properties in the past two months. It includes:

Traffic summary

Top 5 referral sites

Top 30 referral spam sources

Referral traffic sessions (a comparison of regular and referral

spam traffic)

Bounce rate (a comparison of regular and referral spam traffic)

Session duration (a comparison of regular and referral spam

traffic)

Here are the steps that we need to take to create this referral spam

report from the template:

Step 1. Download the template.

Step 2. Authorize Analytics Canvas to connect to Google Analytics

data.

Step 3. Select a Google Analytics profile.

Analytics Canvas Tutorial:

General User Interface Overview

N m o d a l S o l u t i o n s I n c . A l l R i g h t s R e s e r v e d

Download the Template

This template is available for download. You can find it in Analytics

Canvas by clicking on (Show Examples) button.

Navigate to the Referral Traffic Single Website Report, select it and

click Next.

Figure 1 Referral Traffic Single Website Report

Authorize Analytics Canvas to Connect to Google Analytics Data

This tutorial uses Google Analytics Core Reporting. If you haven’t done

so already, Analytics Canvas will prompt you to authorize Google

Analytics.

Analytics Canvas Tutorial:

General User Interface Overview

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Figure 2 Authorize Google Analytics

The email you authorize must have access to your Google Analytics

data. You have a choice to grant ‘Read only’ access, or ‘Read and write’

access. Read and write access allows you to perform data upload.

Figure 3 Google Authentication window

In the next window, press Accept to confirm the authorization. You

can revoke this at any point in the future, if you wish.

Now we are ready to set up the Google Analytics Query.

Analytics Canvas Tutorial:

General User Interface Overview

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Select a Google Analytics Profile

Select a single Google Analytics profile, include in a query, and click

OK.

Figure 4 Query Definition

Analytics Canvas will load the template and generate a report in

Excel. To open the report, click on the file in the notification message.

Figure 5 Open the report

How is referral spam identified?

Analytics Canvas queries Google Analytics API and imports the data

for analysis. Filter blocks and calculation blocks identify spam using

the following function:

Analytics Canvas Tutorial:

General User Interface Overview

N m o d a l S o l u t i o n s I n c . A l l R i g h t s R e s e r v e d

IsReferralSpam([Original.fullReferrer])

The function returns true if the string provided contains any of the

known referral spam sources. It is not case sensitive.

Conclusion Thank you for reading this tutorial on cleaning referral traffic data

with Analytics Canvas. We invite you to continue with the tutorial

training, and learn more about using Analytics Canvas.