How to Hack Google Analytics

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I wish I could say RealTechNews used Google Analytics but our invitation must still be lost in the mail . That said, a smart guy named Terril Dent stumbled across a little issue with Google Analytics that skewed the traffic results on his site by accident. Even worse, this simple hack renders the traffic reports uterrly meaningless.

I was looking at the “Content by Titles” report on Google Analytics and noticed a page title that didn’t seem to belong to my website. I opened the site via FTP to make sure I hadn’t uploaded a page that shouldn’t be live. Nothing. So back into Google Analytics I went, I wanted to know why this page was generating hits. It turns out that someone had copied the source code of my Google Maps housing project and was hosting it on their own website, but forgot to remove my Analytics references. Whenever someone hit the page on their site, it would thus register as a hit in my analytics. Source: Terril.ca va Digg

As He Said: “If your website generated enough traffic, you could effectively render a target websites Analytics meaningless.” Can it be so easy?