
Referral traffic is basically any traffic that comes to your website from another source. This could be from a link on another website, an email, or even from social media.
While referral traffic can be beneficial, there are also times when you don’t want it to skew your data.
That’s where referral exclusions come in with.
Referral exclusions allow you to exclude certain referral traffic from being tracked in Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
To exclude referral traffic in your Google Analytics 4 reports, follow these easy steps:
Step 1: Go to the extreme bottom of your GA4 property and then click on “admin” in the bottom left-hand corner.
Step 2: Click on the “Data Streams”.
Step 3: Click on “Web” and exclude referrals on your preferred web data stream.
Step 4: Click “Configure Tag Settings” and choose “Show All” in the settings panel.
Step 5: Choose “List unwanted referrals.”
Step 6: Click on the configuration panel and type in any domain that you want to exclude. Select a match type (i.e referral domain contains) and finally hit the “Save” button.
Martin Kura
A multi-cultural nerd, digital marketer and SEO/content enthusiast. Likes good beer, dry wine, loves to cook and sing (sometimes all at once).