If you’ve opened Google Analytics recently and seen leadsgo.io showing up as a referral source or one of your top pages, you’re not alone. If you go to that site (not recommended), it redirects you to Trafficbooster, a VERY sketchy site that proclaims itself as a source of cheap, geo-targeted traffic for websites.
This, and other sites like it, use a marketing ploy called “analytics spam”. Their goal is to show up in your analytics and trigger your curiosity. They hope you’ll then go to their site and buy their (fake) traffic service.
Is leadsgo a security risk for my website?
This type of spam can come from two sources:
- “Ghost” or “phantom” traffic: Spammers directly trigger your Google Analytics tag without even visiting or loading your website.
- Bot traffic: Automated bots that visit your actual website. These can waste a bit of bandwidth and skew engagement data in GA4.
Either way, analytics spam is usually not a security risk. It’s more of an annoyance that messes up your analytics reports.
However, the most important safety rule is do not click or enter these domains on your computer as part of your investigation as these sites often have other security risks. If you insist on checking these spam sites out, be sure to use a VPN and a private tab or browser.
How do I block analytics spam from my site?
If the analytics spam looks like ghost / phantom traffic, then your best option is to simply block the domain in GA4. Here are the steps:
- In GA4, click the Admin (gear) icon.
- Go to Data Streams > Web.
- Click on the web data stream to edit it.
- Click “Configure tag settings”.
- Click the “Show more” button.
- Click “List unwanted referrals”.
- Add leadsgo.io (or whatever domain you want to block) into the domain field.
- Click the “Save” button in the upper-right corner.
If it looks like actual bots impacting your site, then you’ll want to block the domain at your hosting provider or web application firewall. Your tech team can help you with this.
If your site targets only traffic from your country (or a specific set of countries), you might also consider blocking international traffic from your website. Many of these spam sites are located overseas.