I’m sure by now if you regularly use Google Analytics, you’ve seen a line on your Audience dashboard under “Language” that reads “Secret. ɢoogle. com You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump!” and it’s beginning to irritate you.

Not only does this spam affect your VIEWS, but it’s different from standard spam in that it may be affecting your Average Time On Site metrics, and Pages Per Visit metrics. Sorry about that growth you saw, it’s probably a result of this spam.

But! I’m here to help. I got tired of seeing this time and time again in my own analytics, so I’ve come up with a handy removal guide. (Note: this will only remove spam data moving forward, it cannot affect the historical data already recorded, I’m sorry.)

First, navigate to your filters page and select “Add New Filter.”

Next, you’re going to create a new filter named “Spam Language” and select “Custom” as the filter type.

Select “Language Settings” as the filter field, and then, because this spam uses characters that SHOULD NOT be able to show up in Language by manipulating code commands (and using more characters than language tags usually use), you’re going to paste the following into the “Filter Pattern” box:

.{12,}|\s[^s]*\s|\.|,|\!|\/

Once you have that done, Verify the filter to make sure it’s working, and then Save!

For reference, on our site, this removes roughly 20 sessions a day, with an average session duration of 15 minutes. Yay clean data!