How to block Ghost/Spam Visits in Google Analytics 4

Ghost (spam) visits in Google Analytics 4 are fake data that are inserted into your Google Analytics account without an actual visit to your website taking place.
They are sent by automated systems (bots) with the purpose of promoting unwanted websites, misleading through fake statistics, or creating an impression by recording spam referrers.

Ghost/spam Google Analytics visits do not actually load your website, they are not visits to your server, but they send data directly to Google Analytics’ Measurement Protocol using your Tracking ID. For this reason, they cannot be stopped at the hosting level.

To avoid distortion of your data that affects your marketing campaigns, and to avoid the appearance of malicious links in your Analytics, it is important to address the problem.

Valid Hostname Filter

This method blocks all entries with an invalid hostname.

Below we provide an example where we assume it concerns the website “www.trustservers.gr”. You need to replace the “Value” in step 3 with your own website (hostname).

1. Log in to your GA4 account as an administrator of the Google Analytics account https://analytics.google.com
2. Click on the “Admin” icon and in the “Property” column, select “Data Settings” and then “Data Filters”. There, click on “+ Create Filter”
3. In this step we “filter” visits. We exclude visits that do not have “www.trustservers.gr” or “trustservers.gr” as hostname.
   Fill in the following:
   Filter name: Block Ghost Spam
   Filter type: Custom filter
   Dimension: Hostname
   Condition: does not match regex
   Value: ^(www\.)?trustservers\.gr$
   Action: Exclude
4. Click on “Create”

The filter is activated immediately for future data (historical data is not modified).

Additional protection

• We recommend periodically checking the “Acquisition > Traffic acquisition” reports for suspicious referrers
• You can add known spam domains to the Referral Exclusion List (Admin → Data Streams → [Stream] → More Tagging Settings)
• Don’t trust third-party “solutions”: We recommend avoiding plugins that promise “complete protection”. Ghost visits bypass your website and send data directly to GA. The filter in GA4 is the only reliable solution.