PayPal is one of the leading payment gateways, and it’s no wonder why your clients prefer to use it for its security. However, your Google Analytics 4 property can record PayPal traffic as referral traffic that can skew your analytics and make reports at least less incomplete or at most useless. 

Therefore, removing PayPal traffic from your Google Analytics 4 reports using the referral exclusion list is crucial. Let’s look at how to do it step by step. 

Removing PayPal from Google Analytics 4 reports

To check if you have the situation I mentioned above, you can go to the GA4 Traffic Acquisition report, select source/medium as the primary dimension, and see if you see “paypal.com / referral” as a referral. If you have it, you will find it quickly. And it will look similar to what you can see below.

So, if you have it, it means that Google Analytics 4 incorrectly assigns transactions to the session acquisition source. Of course, it’s something that we need to fix.

In order to fix it, you should add “paypal.com” to the “Unwanted referrals” list. To do it, you should take the following steps:

After you take these two steps, GA4 won’t consider PayPal as the referral and won’t show it in the traffic reports. The traffic will be assigned to the source that initially acquired the traffic. 

Conclusions

Google Analytics 4 can report Paypal traffic as referral traffic. In this case, you should use the aforementioned method to exclude this referral from analytics. After that, the GA4 reports will show the new data correctly. 

If you encounter any issues with the implementation or have a question, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below. 

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