Title says it all folks. Another clever way to get you to vote for Trump (at the time) and another way it seems; around Google’s spam filters (sarcasm detected).

This little tricky bugger managed to sneak its way in and give inspiration to a whole new kind of statistics spamming which without a doubt will lead to many a more spammers spamming our stats and skewing our data.

I dont have solutions on how to stop this but think it’s time to really start looking for alternatives. The reality, as many of you reading this will agree; is that it kills the purpose of statistics gathering on smaller sites (like this one) by shear volume of hits.

You wake one morning, reckon you hit the jackpot with 500 extra hits overnight only to realize your mothers quote you shared on your blog did in fact NOT go viral and rather a note by some (god knows who) Trump supporter with his / her friendly reminder to vote.

What the dang can you do to solve this problem?

Find another supplier? Not exactly. Google will always be king and IT’S FREE! Are there other alternatives? Yes indeed. Are they better? Nope. I’ve been using the whole dang lot for some time now as the combo of all of them together make the difference.

If you are up for the challenge, here’s a fantastic post that shows you how to tweak your Analytics account to not show them in the first place.

Try Clicky– not a bad alternative at all. Your bounce rates on Clicky will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside when you start getting down to the 20% range (they count bounces the right way). As for the platform itself, it’s free too, but it feels free if that makes any sense.

I would love to be able to simply jump onto Clicky and redesign the interface as the system behind the UX is actually not bad at all. Does it have the potential to become a replacement? With a good redesign and maybe a couple of extras- I certainly think so.

Message to Clicky: get a good designer and UX professional/s (I and many others may do this for free just to be a part of it) and you’ll have the market…

Try Quantcast. Ok, hands down. Quantcast feels like the Rolls Royce of the alternatives. It’s silky smooth, gives you in depth user and demographic information that you simply cannot get from Google Analytics.

From an unbiased perspective, Quantcast is really only good for accurate monthly visitors / users / page views and what platform they visited your site from. The demographic information that you get such as average incomes, interests, how many kids your visitors have / don’t have et al., are what make it shine.

Oh, and did I say it looks beautiful? It’s a masterpiece but missing a lot of valuable statistics to make it even come close to taking business from GA which I don’t think is their strategy either way.

Good ‘ol Jetpack– Wordpress + Jetpack = LOVE. It’s that simple. Its sleek, refined and with a new look UI; I’m all on it. Only thing is it always does you no favors on the hits side of things. Jetpack shows the least amount of hits on average (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) than all the above mentioned stats providers.

They do however really keep on track with all the spammers (which is why you and I are here in the first place) and if they miss one or two you are quickly able to simply mark it as spam via your dashboard (referral only) and it disappears never to be shown in your stats again. Viola.

If you are using a WordPress site then Jetpack comes with a whole bunch of other goodies such as… (definitely worth its own post).

Verdict Ladies and Gentlemen (and Spam Bots/ Crawlers).

Click the links above or Google the alternatives mentioned in this post (no affiliate links… yet… hmmmmm….) and signup. Pop those tracking scripts right into the header of your site and let em babies start collecting data.

Choose the best stats (per item needed) of the three / four you do use and feel warm and fuzzy inside. Oh and to any spam bots / crawlers reading this… F*&k you very much, it’s really appreciated.