What is ShareButton in Google Analytics?

Seeing an unknown source called "ShareButton" sending traffic to your website in Google Analytics can be confusing. It wasn't a campaign you ran, and it doesn't look like a normal website. This short guide will explain exactly what this traffic is, why it's a problem for your data, and how you can get rid of it for good.

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What Exactly is ShareButton in Google Analytics?

If you see get.sharebutton.co, sharebutton.to, or a similar variation in your referral traffic report, it’s not real traffic. This is a common form of spam known as referrer spam or ghost spam.

Spammers aren't interested in your website's content. Their goal is simple: to get you to visit their website. They know that website administrators and marketers regularly check their analytics reports. When you see a strange referral source, your first instinct is often curiosity. You might copy and paste the URL into your browser to see what it is, and just like that, you've given them the website visit they wanted.

These visits often lead to sites filled with ads, affiliate links, or sometimes malicious software. The spammer gets a tiny bit of ad revenue or a potential affiliate commission from your simple 'fact-finding' visit.

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How Does Ghost Spam Work?

What’s especially tricky about this type of spam is that the "visitor" never actually loads your website. Normal traffic happens when someone clicks a link, their browser loads your site, and your Google Analytics tracking code sends "hit" data to Google's servers.

Ghost spammers skip your website entirely. They use something called the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol. This is a system that allows developers to send raw data directly to Google Analytics servers. Spammers exploit this by writing a script that randomly generates Google Analytics Tracking IDs (like UA-XXXXX-Y) and sends fake hit data to them.

Because they are just spraying fake data at thousands of random IDs, they don't know who they are hitting. They just know that some of those IDs will belong to active websites, and the owners of those sites will see their fake referrer URL in the reports.

Why Referrer Spam Is a Problem for Your Reports

A few fake sessions might not seem like a big deal, but referrer spam can seriously distort your data, leading you to make poor decisions.

• Inflated Traffic Metrics: Spam inflates your basic traffic numbers, including users, sessions, and pageviews. It makes your site look more popular than it is, which can be misleading if you're reporting on growth or performance.
• Skewed Engagement Metrics: Since these fake visitors don't interact with your site, their sessions have a 100% bounce rate (in Universal Analytics) or a 0% engagement rate (in GA4). Their time on site is zero seconds. When these fake metrics are averaged with your real user data, it can drastically lower your site-wide average session duration and engagement rate while artificially increasing your bounce rate.
• Inaccurate Audience Data: Spam can add fake data to your demographic and geographic reports, polluting your understanding of who your actual audience is and where they come from.
• Misleading Decision-Making: The biggest danger is making strategic decisions based on bad data. If you see traffic going up, you might think a recent campaign is working when, in reality, it's just a spam attack. This faulty data makes it harder to identify what marketing efforts are truly effective.

How to Identify ShareButton Spam in Your Analytics

Spotting referrer spam is straightforward once you know where to look. The key is to check the hostname associated with the traffic.

A hostname is the domain where the session occurred. For legitimate traffic, the hostname should be your own website's domain (e.g., yourwebsite.com or blog.yourwebsite.com). Ghost spam traffic often uses a fake hostname or leaves it as "(not set)".

Finding Spam in Universal Analytics (UA)

Most people will find referrer spam by looking at their referral report.

1. Navigate to Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals.
2. Look for suspicious sources like sharebutton.to.
3. Click on the source to see the metrics. You'll likely see a very high bounce rate (close to 100%) and an average session duration near 00:00:00.

To confirm it’s ghost spam, check the hostname:

1. In the same referrals report, add a secondary dimension. Click the Secondary Dimension button above the table.
2. Type "Hostname" into the search box and select it.

You’ll now see a table showing the referral source and the hostname for each session. Legitimate traffic will show your domain. ShareButton and other ghost spam will almost always show a hostname of (not set) or some other random, unrelated domain.

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Finding Spam in Google Analytics 4

The process in GA4 is similar, but the navigation is different.

1. Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
2. The default dimension is "Session default channel group". Click the dropdown arrow and change it to Session source.
3. Look for the suspicious referral source in the list.

To check the hostname in GA4, you need to create a custom exploration:

1. Go to the Explore tab on the left-hand menu and create a new Blank exploration.
2. In the "Variables" column, click the "+" sign next to Dimensions.
3. Search for "Hostname" and "Session source" and import both.
4. In the "Variables" column, click the "+" sign next to Metrics.
5. Search for "Sessions" and import it.
6. Drag Session source and Hostname from the Dimensions list to the Rows section under "Tab Settings".
7. Drag Sessions from the Metrics list to the Values section.

This report will show you every traffic source paired with the hostname it was recorded on. Just like in UA, any traffic from ShareButton will probably have a hostname that is '(not set)' or not your domain, confirming it is spam.

Permanent Fix: How to Block ShareButton Spam

Many guides suggest blocking referrer spam using a Referral Exclusion List. This is not the correct approach for ghost spam. Referral exclusion is designed for telling Google Analytics to stop treating sessions from specific domains (like your payment processor) as new referrals. It doesn’t stop the spam hits from being recorded, it just re-categorizes them, often as "(direct) / (none)," which is even worse.

The correct and most permanent solution is to filter out all traffic that isn't from your own valid hostnames.

Filtering Spam in Universal Analytics

In Universal Analytics, the best practice is to create a filter that only includes hits from your own domains. This single filter will block ShareButton and almost all other forms of ghost spam automatically.

**Important:** Before creating any filter, always set up a new "Test View" in your GA property. Apply the filter to the test view first to make sure it works correctly and doesn’t accidentally block real traffic. Once you've confirmed it works, you can apply it to your main reporting view.

Here’s how to create the filter:

1. Go to Admin > View > Filters.
2. Click the + Add Filter button.
3. Give your filter a name, like "Include Valid Hostnames".
4. For Filter Type, select Custom.
5. Select the Include radio button.
6. From the Filter Field dropdown, choose Hostname.
7. In the Filter Pattern text box, enter your valid domain(s) using a bit of regular expression (RegEx).
8. Click Save.

From this point forward, your GA view will only collect data from sessions that occur on the hostnames you specified, effectively eliminating all ghost spam.

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Handling Spam in Google Analytics 4

GA4 does things differently. The View-level filters from Universal Analytics are gone. GA4 has better automated bot filtering, but some spam can still get through.

While you can’t create a direct hostname-include filter that modifies the raw data, you can use the List unwanted referrals feature to block specific referring domains:

1. Go to Admin > Data Streams and click on your web stream.
2. Under "Google tag", click on Configure tag settings.
3. Click Show more, then select List unwanted referrals.
4. Under "Match type", select Referral domain contains.
5. For "Domain", enter sharebutton. Using a broad term can catch multiple variations like sharebutton.to and sharebutton.co.
6. Click Add condition to add more domains if needed.
7. Click Save.

This method works well for known spam referrers but is more reactive than the proactive hostname filter in UA. You'll have to add new spam domains as they appear. Thankfully, GA4's improved spam protection makes this a far less frequent chore than it used to be.

Final Thoughts

In summary, "ShareButton" traffic is referrer spam designed to clutter your reports and lure you to the spammer's website. It pollutes your data, but because it never actually visits your site, it can be easily cleaned up. The most effective method is creating a hostname inclusion filter in Universal Analytics or carefully managing referrals in GA4 to ensure your data is clean, accurate, and reliable.

After cleaning up your data, ensuring your reports stay organized can feel like another full-time job. We created Graphed to solve this problem by connecting directly to your Google Analytics account, letting you build real-time dashboards using simple English. Instead of getting lost inside the GA interface, you can just ask questions like "Show me my top traffic sources last month, excluding spam referrers," and get instant, clean visualizations. This keeps your data accurate and your reporting fast.