False Positives in analytics: View Botting & Fake visitor spam

     Did you know that sometimes in viewing your analytics, that you could be looking at false positives?  Well, that's what I'm calling it anyway.  In an experiment, like those that you would diagnose yourself, you might get yourself misdiagnosed because of something that the test randomly sees as real, but in reality, is not an appropriate real answer for that particular diagnosis.  Similarly, when you're looking at a website's analytics, and trying to see whether or not you've had a "popular" day, it may look like you have had thousands of views, but looking deeper, you'll see it's coming from a weird place that probably doesn't make any sense.  In essence, it might be views from just one or two random "robots" or programs that don't represent real people.
     Like "SWATt-ing", where someone illegitimately makes a call to 911 and a Special Weapons And Tactics team may come to a unsuspecting victim, viewbotting is most likely caused by one programmer that creates an application that will accidentally or not cause your browser to open the same websites multiple times seemingly from several different Internet protocol addresses.  I don't know how this could be lucrative to anyone. Perhaps it is doing some sort of hacking where it is mining for data that would be useful to it, including for phone numbers, addresses and emails that it could add to its own database.  And perhaps armed with enough information, that programmer could do much worse things that I'd rather not think about.

 I was researching a client's hundreds of views and noted that much of it was coming from Poland and in particular the result of a link from "News.Grets.Store" 

Here are two related links:

• Fake Visitor Spam link
• How Viewbotting works link