Has stealing other sites’ Google Analytics code snippet become a valid (albeit desperate) strategy to lure visitors to a website?

Last week, in glancing at the ‘Content Drilldown’ report in the Content Reports of the profile for our company website, I noticed not only the two top-level sites I expected to see, but also the names of two domains that I’d never seen before, one of which contained some language I won’t repeat here, for the sake of professionalism.

Was this some intern’s idea of a joke, I wondered? It seemed highly unlikely, if only because both sites were russian (.ru). Several other analysts joined the investigation into the anomaly – it was well-warranted, by virtue of the fact that visits to these domains were likely compromising the quality of our profile’s data, which we use not only in our web strategy but also for demonstrations during the company’s Google Analytics training course.

It was discovered that the less foul-named of the two was a porn site. The other displayed an html page with a design featuring a question mark, as it churned to load what eventually turned into a site that, true to its name, out-porned the other.

We checked the account numbers on the current pages on these sites, only to find that they no longer matched ours. One possible explanation behind a case like this might be a mis-typed account number, by one digit. But the new numbers in the code snippets on these sites were very different than ours.

Is this a desperate strategy to gain visitors, one based on the assumption that the sites will eventually be seen via the ‘Content Drilldown’ report (or another of the Content Reports) by a curious analyst examining the pirated site’s data, one who happens to have vulgar tastes and time to spare?

Perhaps that was not the best segway into advising you to watch your ‘Content Drilldown’ report more closely.