Latest update: Added some instructions about how I’m blocking traffic from Slideshare from showing up in my reports.

Update: After tweeting about it a couple of times and posting my site on Digg and Hacker News, a representative from Slideshare contacted me (see comments under post) and my code has removed my code from their site – Luckily, I shouldn’t exceed the free quota for Analytics. Regardless I’m still feeling the aftermath through Google’s cache of their site.

Update: I found my Analytics code in this file – http://public.slidesharecdn.com/v3/scripts/combined.js

Hi Slideshare,

I had an interesting surprise as I checked my Analytics today – Visits had jumped up over 800,000% from the previous day.

I dug a little deeper and couldn’t believe that it was my traffic, so I took a look at the host names report and as it turns out, my Google Analytics code has been placed on SlideShare.net:

Now I can’t see my content and Google is telling me it’s sending me 1M+ visits per day, unless I create an advanced segment.

As much as I’d like to see Analytics, I’m very quickly reaching the 5 million pageviews per month limit and I don’t pay for AdWords. So if you’re reading this, please take my code down off your site.

Cheers,
Rob

How I plugged the hole in Google Analytics

Simple – after I noticed it, I created a filter on my affected profiles (except for my Raw profile, which I like to keep unfiltered) with the following options:

Doing so reduced the problem considerably (see the difference between the Raw and All Traffic profiles):

Anyway, that’s what you’ll need to do if this problem ever affects you. For your sake, I hope it doesn’t.