Catching traffic pointed at the wrong domain
Most tagging problems announce themselves — a typo, a missing tag, a DNS record that never propagated. This one doesn't. It happens when another Measurebase customer's site ends up sending its visitor data into your account instead of its own — quietly, with no error on either side, until someone notices the numbers look wrong.
How this actually happens
It's never malicious — it's always a copy-paste mistake somewhere upstream:
- A tracking snippet gets copied from a production site to a staging or demo site and nobody swaps the tagging server config before it goes live
- An agency reuses one client's installed snippet as the starting point for a new client's site, and one reference to the wrong domain slips through
- A subdomain gets reassigned to a different property internally, and an old page still cached or deployed somewhere keeps pointing at the original tagging server
In every case, the requests are real and well-formed — they're just arriving on the wrong account's tagging server, so they get billed to the wrong quota and counted in the wrong dashboard.
Why it matters more than a stray hit
Beyond the obvious — traffic and conversion numbers that don't match what you'd expect from your own site — foreign traffic quietly consumes your request quota and, if it's another business's visitor data landing in your account, raises the same privacy questions as any other case of data ending up somewhere it shouldn't.
How Measurebase catches it
This is one of the checks that runs continuously as part of Measurebase's monitoring: Measurebase checks whether any other domain registered in the system shows up as a Referer on yours. If it does, an alert opens against your domain — no manual investigation required to notice something's off.
Like every other monitoring alert, it shows up on the alert bell, on the Alerts page, and by email the moment it opens, and it clears itself automatically once the misdirected traffic stops.
If you get one of these alerts
Start with whichever domain the alert names as the source. Check that domain's installed snippet against what's actually configured for it in Measurebase — the mismatch is almost always sitting in the tracking script itself, not in your own setup.