Filtering a spurious visitor from Google Analytics reports

My site promotes a rental holiday home in Italy. It only receives a fairly small number of visits but that's OK as the market is pretty specialised and I only need to make a small number of sales. My problem is that almost 20% of the visits to my site, and 1/3 of those coming via search engines, are identical and seem to be spurious. This is seriously distorting my data.

The visits all come from the same geographic location (Salford UK), all have a 100% bounce rate and all are via this Google search:

bedroom site:www.villa-ilmelo.com​

So my questions are:

1) Does anybody have any idea of why this would be happening?
2) I have tried filtering on IP address but Google Analytics won't supply this information for privacy reasons so is there any other way of excluding it from my Analytics results (without also excluding genuine traffic)?

Thanks

 

Google doesn't supply you with any personally identifiable information regarding your visitor. For this reason, you will not be provided with the IP address of the user. When it comes to filtering a profile based on IP addresses, this might be more appropriate to use in situations where you would like to exclude your company traffic seen in your data, whose IP address may be known to you. In your particular case, what I would suggest you do is to create a filter on Visitor country or visitor region, if its only a spurious result with 100% bounce rate that your receive associated with this particular country/city.
Hope this helps.

 

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply Faizali. I had already said that I couldn't use IP address (I only mentioned it to avoid people making that suggestion.) I can't filter on country as that would exclude most of my traffic since UK is my main market and I was reluctant to filter on city as that too will exclude valid traffic. I was hoping for less obvious solutions but will have to go with filtering on City if nothing else comes up.

One further piece of information - I incorrectly said this traffic all came from one city. I have now checked every hit and, in fact, it comes from two 'cities': Salford and Kearsley. Salford is a fairly large city but Kearsley is a small suburb very close to Salford (only 2 or 3 km) so presumably the actual source of all the hits is the same. I don't know enough about network configuration or the geographic identity of IP addresses to know why two different cities are coming up.

 

If it was me, I'd consider getting the IP from my logs, and blocking them from accessing my site in my ht.access file

 

Thanks Magda - that's a wee bit technical for me but I'll look into it.

 

hmm. you could make use of the advanced filter option then. You could add appropriate metrics and obtain the required data. In your case, perhaps you could apply a filter for bounce rate (greater than or equal to 100%). And then select region from the pull down menu in the header. This will show you all regions from where you had a cent percent bounce rate including the ones you mentioned. You can export this to an excel sheet or pdf and manipulate further.

And in your original data within the analytics interface, you could apply advanced filter to not show you data with 100% bounce rate.

 

And I was also thinking of one more way. Are you noting this behaviour for a particular landing page alone? In that case you can apply a filter for Request URI and visitor region on a different profile.

 

Thanks for these helpful suggestions faizali - I'll try out the filtering you suggest. Unfortunately the landing page option doesn't work as they are landing on the home page.