: Where is this traffic with doubleclick.net referrers coming from, and how can I block it in Google Analytics? We're seeing Google Analytics report a huge amount of hits and large drop rate on

@Berryessa370

Posted in: #ApacheLogFiles #GoogleAnalytics #Traffic #Url

We're seeing Google Analytics report a huge amount of hits and large drop rate on some of our pages, but investigating this further reveals more questions than answers.

For instance, one page is reported to have over 1000 hits this month, but in our database (Magento) we only see 6 hits.

When I look into the Apache access log, I do see many GETs for this URL, but they all have a referrer like this:
dp.g.doubleclick.net/apps/domainpark/domainpark.cgi?client=dp-oversee17_3ph_xml&channel=001071&hl=en&adtest=off&max_radlink_len=20&r=m&fexp=21404&domain_name=hcartoon.com&optimize_terms=off&terms=Cartoon%2C%20Flash%20Animation%2C%20Caricature%2C%20Cartoon%20Picture%2C%20Free%20Animated%20Ecards%2C%20Cartoon%20Animation%2C%20Funny%20Posters%2C%20Cartoon%20Clip%20Art%2C%20Cartoonist%2C%20Toons%2C%20Cartoonist%2C%20Toons%2C%20Funny%20Picture%2C%20Cartoon%20Posters%2C%20Caricatures%2C%20Cartoonists%2C%20Toon%2C%20Business%20Cartoons&drid=as-drid-
And it goes on... I'm assuming it is a feeble attempt to DDoS, but that's not the question, I'll save that for a different SE.

Could this be skewing our Google Analytics numbers? If so, how can we sanitize Google Analytics so that these types of GETs aren't counted?

EDIT: We do not use AdWords. We do have an AdWords account set up but have never utilized it. I traced the logged IP addresses to various places outside the U.S. like Sri Lanka, Taiwan, ...ad nauseam.

EDIT 2: All of the GET requests seem to have a ?gclid= in the URL. I'm beginning to wonder if there's some black-hat SEO aimed at making us think our metrics are bad so we'll hire one of them. We do get SEO spam all the time... Regardless, still looking for a way to filter past Google Analytics data.

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