Universal Analytics has a referral exclusion list feature that allows you to remove some referral sources (domains) from your Referral Traffic report. Where is it in GA4? How to use the referral exclusion list in Google Analytics 4? 

These are the questions I had in my mind too. Therefore, I dedicate this article to explaining why and how to exclude specific referrals from your GA4 reports. 

What are referral traffic and self-referral traffic in Google Analytics 4?

Referral traffic is the segment of traffic that lands on your website through another source, like a link on another website, etc. GA4 automatically recognises such traffic as Referral and shows you the source of this traffic (the website domain) in its reports. 

Self-referral traffic is a different term that means that the referral traffic that your website receives originated from your website. By default, Google Analytics 4 shouldn’t identify such traffic as Referral, but sometimes it happens for many different reasons. Therefore, we will figure out how to exclude such traffic from the GA4 reports below. 

Since unwanted referrals and self-referral traffic can skew your data significantly, it’s highly recommended to block such referrals in Google Analytics 4. However, before that, you need to understand what referrals you want to exclude.

How to see referral traffic in Google Analytics 4?

To understand that, when you set up Google Analytics 4 or migrate from Universal Analytics, firstly, you should give it some time to run for a few days. After that, you can build a report to see all your referrals. One of the ways to do it is to use the GA4 Exploration feature. 

So, if you want to check your referrals, please take the following steps:

1. Go to GA4 -> Explorations -> Create a new report.
2. Import the following metrics and dimensions:
   1. Session default channel grouping
   2. Session source
   3. Event count
3. Set up your report:
   1. Add “session source” dimension in rows
   2. Add “event count” metric in values
   3. Add “Session default channel grouping” in Filters, select filter type “contain” and type “Referral”. 

If you do everything right, you should get the following report. 

Once you build the report, you need to know which referrals to look at for removal. Therefore let’s move to the next section. 

Why can you want to remove some referrals from your GA4 reports?

There are certain situations when you want to remove some referrals from showing in your Google Analytics 4 reports. The main ones are:

1. You are using the 3-party payment gateway for checkout pages, and a visitor journey looks like they land on the product page that’s on your website. They add the product to the cart and go to checkout pages that are on the payment provider website, and then you redirect them back to thank you page. Unfortunately, in this case, your payment provider website will be recognised as “Referral”, and all your purchases in Google Analytics will be assigned to this source. 
2. The second situation is more common for SaaS companies, it’s when you redirect your user to some other platform or domain to change their credentials, and then you redirect them back to your main website.

Although the situations are different, the core idea is always the same. It’s not an actual referral. They don’t send traffic to your website but rather return your website traffic after a particular action. Therefore, we should eliminate them from Google Analytics reports. 

You can find examples of the first and the second situations in the screenshot below. 

In this report, the sixth referral represents the payment provider (situation #1) and the second one represents the domain where ecommerce users can change their credentials. 

Therefore, we are interested in excluding such referrals from our Google Analytics 4 reports. Let’s do it, then. 

How to exclude referral traffic in Google Analytics 4?

So, to exclude specific referral traffic from GA4 reports, you should do the following steps:

After you make these steps, you can wonder what will happen. Of course, Google Analytics will start not to detect the traffic from these domains as referral ones but what will exactly happen? There is an answer to this question.

What will happen to that referral traffic once we exclude it in GA4?

According to the Google documentation, once you add a referral into “GA4 unwanted referrals”, analytics evaluates events sent from your website and appends the ignore_referrer parameter with a value of true to every event that matches the conditions (ignore_referrer=true). This parameter indicates to Analytics that the referrer should not be displayed as a traffic source. Yes, it’s so easy and so valuable! 

However, if you look at the screenshot above once again, you will find many self-referral traffic sources. This mainly happens because the website “CIMALP” is multi-language, and every language is represented by its domain. Website visitors can switch between versions and go from one website to another. This is precisely the self-referral traffic I mentioned at the beginning of this article. 

It’s also referral traffic that we are not interested to see in our GA4 reports. So how should we address this?

How to exclude self-referral traffic from Google Analytics 4 reports?

This is a bit different traffic – cross-domain traffic. The best way to address it is to look at what mentions in Google documentation.  And they offer to configure your domains in Google Analytics 4, which will also help you to set up cross-domain tracking correctly. 

So, to exclude self-referral traffic from GA4, you should go to  

1. Go to Admin -> Data Streams -> Web Data Stream Details -> Configure Tag Settings -> Configure your domains
2. Include all domains that match your company ones and that you want to exclude since it’s self-referral traffic. 

In our case, it looks the following way.

Final Word

Businesses nowadays use third-party platforms for payments or updating users’ credentials. Usually, Google Analytics 4 detects traffic from these platforms as Referral. It’s not right. In this article, I showed you how to exclude unwanted referral traffic from your GA4 reports. If you have any ideas or questions, please leave a comment below.