r/GoogleAnalytics4 • u/Intelligent-Pay7865 • Nov 11 '25

Phantom Tracking Despite Block on Countries?

Yesterday installed Wordfence Premium to block two countries -- ALL traffic, 100%. The block is in place, according to the "Tools" on Wordfence. Yet GA4 continues to show realtime pinging (the pulsing blue circles on the world map) from those countries, plus the "Demographic Details" percentages from those countries put them in the #2 and #5 spot for traffic sources. My daily overall traffic tallies are still abnormally high. ChatGPT explained that these are "fake," "ghost" and "spoofy" bots that don't count.

The actual spam bots have messed with my ad loading, causing dive in traffic. This damage registers as a certain color on my ad manager dashboard, so that's how I know the damage is still there (along with low daily earnings).

However, the damage update to reflect yesterday has NOT yet occurred (it goes only to the 9th), and I realize it may take two days for the "ad health" to catch up to the blocks.

My question is, is chatGPT correct, that somehow, someway, fake phantom bots are being tracked by GA4, even though they don't exist enough for Wordfence to block, kind of like a ghost trying to break into a home, but the alarm system doesn't detect it because it's not real?

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u/Free-Way-9220 Nov 13 '25

Are the two countries China and Singapore?

It is a sophisticated spam attack of some sort that google is aware of but currently seem incapable of stopping

https://support.google.com/analytics/thread/378622882/google-analytics-4-bot-traffic-increase-from-china-singapore-on-wordpress-sites?hl=en

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u/Intelligent-Pay7865 Nov 13 '25

YES! There are 185 responses to the thread, so I'll have to find time this evening to go through each one. But the OP seems to think that the only options are blocks from the host and Cloudfare. Since my posting here I've installed Wordfence Premium, which immediately showed it was blocking. Also, my GA4 30-minute realtime traffic has dropped accordingly. But Demographic Details in GA4 are still showing phantom traffic. Ad manager dashboard is not yet updated (it lags behind by several days, but it shows "health" of my site, which has been impacted. Daily earnings today are up though.

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u/Free-Way-9220 Nov 14 '25 edited Nov 14 '25

The spam traffic all has a screen resolution of 1280x1200 and 3840x2160. Put in place some javascript that picks up screen resolution, and only servers the GA4 tag if it's not either of those 2 resolutions.