Post on 26-Jun-2018
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
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
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
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
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.