Has Your Google Analytics Been Hacked?

First off, you’re asking yourself.  “Why in the world would someone want to hack my analytics?”  The obvious answer is to just get a peek at your numbers to see how you rate as a competitor.  But Kissmetrics (who also have a security solution) pose two more options:

“I’ve seen hacking occur for two reasons:

Evildoers Want to Corrupt Your Data: If you pissed the wrong person off, they may want to make your life as miserable as possible. And with a large enough site, they could inject all their traffic data into yours. This will make it impossible for you to learn anything about your customers and traffic.

Spammers Driving Traffic: You’re more likely to see situations where spammers inject data into your reports. Their goal is to perk your curiosity and get you to come to their site, resulting in more traffic for them. I think this is a terribly inefficient for building traffic (even for spammers) but people do it.”

So, now you may be saying “Interesting, go on.  And by the way, how did you pick this particular topic?”

The short answer is an admission: I screwed up.  Now the long answer.

Yesterday, as I do every 45 days, I ran a basic Google Analytics (“GA”) report for a client.  After two+ years, and with him sitting at or near the top of most rankings, things are to some extent on auto-pilot.  Most of what I need to know can be found in a quick glance at time on site, bounce rate and overall traffic (hint: it should always be going up).  I run the report, email a two-three sentence summary, he (most likely) never looks at the report, we move on.  However, this quickly became the day every SEO dreads:  bounce rate doubled (bad), time on site cut in half  (worse) and my traffic graph was just shy of being a full blown cliff (worst)!

What happened?  After racking my brain for a few minutes and viewing my other traffic trackers (we’ll get to this later), I finally realized the obvious/not so obvious answer.  The analytics account had been changed to monitor a completely different web site!  Not only that, but the URL of the site in question was very similar to my client’s and belonged to an outfit that I had previously cited as having a great blog.  This company was not local to the South Bay and not a direct competitor, but there IS quite a bit of overlap in the audience for our respective blogs, so this is not good.  Now, GA has recently gone through a revamp at just around the time that I could see that this switch happened, so maybe a glitch in GA was the cause.  However, after doing some research, I found that the company in question has been developing a reputation for walking the line between grey hat and black hat SEO, rather than the white and gray line.  So, it is quite possible that the owners deliberately hacked our GA  themselves, or at best, used poor judgment and hired an SEO who is apparently quite comfortable working in the black hat world.

So what do you do?  The fix is fairly simple. Delete the GA profile and do a fresh re-install of GA on the website, although you will lose your old data.  Not an issue for my client, but if you are a company that relies heavily on GA data, then you may have a bigger problem because once your data is contaminated, there’s no going back.  This is why you should have at LEAST one other tool for measuring your traffic (whether it’s wordpress site stats, statcounter or Bing webmaster tools) so that you always have an alternative to GA.  And always keep PDFs of your reports locally, these won’t go anywhere and will be useful in an emergency.

The moral of the story is pretty simple: DON’T BE COMPLACENT ABOUT ACCOUNT SECURITY!

Lastly, it gets a bit tech-y, but you probably want to at least take a look at this post which gets into how to prevent this kind of hacking.

More SEO Tips and Black Hat vs. White Hat