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Referral Exclusion List in Google Analytics Explained

referral-exclusion

A common issue I see in analytics audits is confusion over what the Referral Exclusion List is supposed to be used for. I hope to clear up some of that confusion in this post.

What Is the Referral Exclusion List?

When Google released the Universal version of Google Analytics, one of the upgrades that came with it was the Referral Exclusion List. You can find it in your property settings by navigating to Admin > Property > Tracking Info > Referral Exclusion List. Then click the + Add Referral Exclusion button, drop the domain into the Domain field (e.g., annielytics.com), and click Create.

Referral Exclusion List Google Analytics

There are two primary issues that Referral Exclusion List seeks to resolve:

Self-Referrals

Self-referrals have been a significant issue in Google Analytics since its inception. We’ve all seen them. You go to your Referrals report (Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals) and find your own site as one of your referrals. For some sites, their own site was in their top 10 referral list before the Referral Exclusion List. And I’ve even done analytics audits and found sites where they are their own top referral.

Lost Credit for Conversions Using Third-Party Tools

When you use a third-party tool that takes a visitor off your site to accomplish some task (be it PayPal, Eventbrite, Freshdesk, etc.) or to a partner site, if the visitor returns to your site to convert or land on a thank you page, the conversion would be credited to the third-party site.

For example, let’s say you are running an event, and you use Eventbrite for event signups. When the visitor returns to your site after signing up and lands on your thank you page, which you use to track a goal conversion, the credit for the conversion would go to Eventbrite. Scandalous, I know.

How Does It Help?

Without the assistance of the Referral Exclusion List, a referral triggers a new session. When you exclude a referral source, visitors who arrive to your site from the excluded domain do not trigger a new session. If you do not want traffic arriving from a specific site to show up as a referral or to trigger a new session when returning from the third-party to your site, you will need to include that domain in your Referral Exclusion List.

So let’s say a visitor comes to your site from Facebook and moves to your third-party site, abc.com. When s/he returns, without the Referral Exclusion List, a new session would be initiated, with the referral coming from abc.com. With abc.com listed in your Referral Exclusion list, the referral would come from facebook.com.

and-there-was-much-rejoicing

Limitations

The Referral Exclusion List preserves the sanctity of the session. BUT it’s duct tape; it’s a plan B, if you will. If you need to know what your visitors are actually doing on your third-party domain (especially if they’re actually converting on that domain, like with PayPal**), you need to set up something called cross-domain tracking. Then you will be able to track your visitors from your domain to the partner site as if they never left your site.

Merely adding a site to your Referral Exclusion List will not allow you to see what your visitors do on the partner site. All of their activity on that site(s) will be unknown to you. Think of that site as a black box. But if you do set up cross-domain tracking, you still need to make sure the third-party/partner domain is listed in the Referral Exclusion List.

**It’s beyond ridiculous that you still can’t add a tracking pixel to your PayPal pages in 2016! If you want to use PayPal, stick to PayPal Professional. Visitors stay on your site.

Why You May Still Have Conversions Attributed to Your Site

For a while you may still see conversions attributed to your own site or a site you excluded. That’s because returning visitors who were cookied before you set up your exclusions will have their conversions attributed to the referral because in the last-click conversion model, direct doesn’t get credit for the conversion if the visitor has visited via a different campaign. (Learn more in this post about Multi-Channel Funnels.) But eventually those cookies will die off, and these conversions will attribute to the original referral.

Common Mistakes

There are some mistakes I see somewhat frequently with the Referral Exclusion List:

  • Removing your domain: When you upgrade to Universal, Google automatically adds your domain to the list. But it’s a common mistake to remove your domain from the list.
  • Including subdomains: You only have to list domains. You would only list a subdomain(s) if you only wanted to exclude specific subdomains on a domain.
  • Listing spam sites: The Referral Exclusion List does nothing to squash spam, so don’t list spam sites. All it will do is cause that traffic to show up as direct.
  • Including the wrong sites: So partner sites are tricky. If you’re using another site you control for something like checkouts or conversions and you want to preserve the original referral for conversions, then it may make sense to include it in your Referral Exclusion List. But that doesn’t mean to throw every site you own onto that list. It will result in traffic from those sites showing up as direct. It would be much better to set up a custom channel that you call Partner and include your partner sites in it. You can learn how to do that in my Channels Guide. I once had a analytics audit client get a post published on Huffington Post. In their excitement, someone excluded huffingtonpost.com. I explained to them that because of that, all of that delicious traffic showed up as direct. Again, I recommended that they create a custom channel for their syndicated content rather than use the Referral Exclusion List.

How to Test

One way to validate that the Referral Exclusion List is working properly is to use Google’s Tag Assistant (learn more). When you traverse domains, it can tell you whether an additional session was created. Look for a flag that looks like this:

Referral Exclusion List test

Comments

  1. Under your “Common Mistakes” section you state the following –

    “Listing spam sites: The Referral Exclusion List does nothing to squash spam, so don’t list spam sites. All it will do is cause that traffic to show up as direct.”

    So, does this mean that all traffic from referrers listed in the referrers exclusion list are categorized as direct traffic?

    Reply

  4. I think I’m slightly confused: 🙁
    “When you exclude a referral source, visitors who arrive to your site from the excluded domain DO NOT trigger a new session.”
    versus
    “The Referral Exclusion List does nothing to squash spam, so don’t list spam sites. All it will do is cause that traffic to show up as direct.”
    Doesn’t that mean the spam site, in order to show up as “direct”, must have triggered a new session?

    Reply

    • You’re not going to leave a legit site, go to a spam site, and return to the legit site. Adding a spam site to your REL would be legitimizing it and elevating it to the role of a partner. The REL is for partner sites, not spam sites.

      Reply

      • Hi Annie, thanks for your response.
        I understand the “proper” use of the list. The problem I have is that I’m looking at someone’s account where they’ve filled the REL with spam listings and claim that now their overall conversion rates will look better because there is considerably less spam traffic bumping up their Referral Medium totals.

        If I could explain that those traffic volumes are now raising the Direct/None totals instead then they might change their set up.
        But wouldn’t that mean sessions from legitimate REL entries (e.g. PayPal) would also bump up the Direct/None totals?

        Reply

        • No because people visit from PayPal in the context of a transaction. There would have to be a link on the PayPal site that someone came across and clicked through to.

          Reply

          • Ok (since they don’t actually use any 3rd party services) I simply tell them that having their own domain in the REL is not causing reported Direct traffic volumes to increase, but having spam sites listed in there is causing an increase in Direct traffic volumes.

          • There is still the possibility to be considered a direct. This may happen when such third party sites show a link or a button saying if you are not redirected in 10 seconds click here or so.

            In practical term by clicking on the button you will incur into the issue (somehow), but as you are likely to land on the thank you page, with the REL on you are not having a new session anyway rather a conversion.

  5. Hi there,

    Is it possible to exclude a specific path, or subsection of a site in the REL?
    For example, is it possible to add “domain.com/products” to the REL, if I want traffic from these pages to be direct, but all other traffic on domain.com to be listed as a referral?

    Thank you!

    Reply

    • I kind of doubt it, but you can always try it if you have enough traffic from that site that aren’t the page you want to exclude. If it doesn’t work, you can test a filter, but that would exclude this traffic completely from your reports, not just send it as direct.

      Reply

  6. Hi,
    I’ve recently joined a new company and I’m in the process of resolving a few issues they have had historically.

    We’ve just upgraded to a newer version of the Magento and we have switched on the Universal Google Analytics – The standard pixel was on the site before
    .
    Having just resolved a conversion tracking issue, I’ve noticed that now the vast majority of my revenue is attributed to the referral channel group as we use WorldPay.

    As you know, you’re directed away from site (3rd party payment) and then back to a thanks you page.

    Having excluded the domain in the referrals list, going forward, should all revenue from the different channels correct itself?

    Thanks

    Damian

    Reply

  7. Hi Annie

    Thanks for a great article. When it comes to identifying the typical 3rd party payment URLs popping up as you go, you can just sort by conversion rate. If you have referral traffic from domains converting up to 100% – well, it is not your business going through the roof – it´s a URL for the exclude list:)

    I also have a question; do you see some errors in this list – some URLs “slipping” through? I have several payment URLs excluded (example acs1.swedbank.se – acs2.swedbank.se – acs3.swedbank.se and so on..), but there is always one of them who is not excluded and still showing up in the referral report. The traffic volume is not noice to my reports, but it annoys me and makes me not trust the exclude list 100%.

    Thanks in advance
    Christian Evensen

    Reply

    • You only need to exclude the domain, not the individual subdomains. Including each subdomain adds additional processing time, increasing the risk of a visitor’s browser not parsing through the code fast enough before s/he moves on to the next page. So I would just put swedbank.se in the REL. That should reduce those referrals.

      Conversions could still be attributed to this domain for a while (up to 6 months) because of how cookies expire and how GA handles direct traffic. I explain how Google handles conversions in the Acquisition reports in this post: https://www.annielytics.com/blog/analytics/multi-channel-funnels-acquisition-reports-dont-get-along/.

      Reply

      • Thanks, very good. I´ll follow this practise.

        But then what when it comes to excluding my own domain? I still want sessions recorded from my blog which is on the sub-domain basecamp.fjellsport.no (TLD fjellsport.no). Will this also be excluded if adding fjellsport.no in the list? And if yes, will utm_parameters over run this exclusion list (example: utm_source=blogg&utm_medium=social) and still take in the traffic?

        Thanks again:)
        C

        Reply

        • You don’t want a new session to be triggered when someone moves back and forth between your different subdomains. The REL helps ensure against that. For that same reason, you never want to use campaign tags on links on your own site. Even if you wanted your blog to be a referrer you get more data letting it come in as a referrer than you do tagging. Hope this clears things up.

          Reply

  9. However, I think I just lost all of my sats data from the last year because of either checking the bot filtering option on settings or applying a filter for my hostname! I sense it may be a long shot, any way to get the missing data back?
    Thanks a bunch.

    Reply

  10. Hey Annie, really enjoyed this write up on REL!

    Something I’ve been meaning to ask you for ages – what software or browser extension do you use for your screen grab annotations? I like the shapes and numbers and haven’t been able to find something myself for PC that just does the job!

    Reply

  11. Hi Annie

    Thanks for the great article and the fact that you are continuing to answer questions. Hopefully you can help me with mine. I have a client site where there are two subdomains. These are set up in GA as two separate properties with different IDs. When a user goes from one to the other, they appear as direct traffic. The domain has been in the referral exclusion list for some time which i guess is why the above appears as direct and not a referral. But the original attribution is still lost.
    I can’t use cross domain tracking with separate UA IDs and had thought that the referral exclusion list should still work in this context. Is that not the case, and if not, is there anything that can be done short of creating a new roll-up property in GA to track subdomains together?

    Thanks
    Garry

    Reply

    • The original referral only remains if a visitor leaves subdomain A to go to subdomain B and comes back to subdomain A. It doesn’t mean that if a visitor visits subdomain A and then clicks through to subdomain B that the original referrer will carry through to subdomain B’s GA property.

      Personally, I wouldn’t use the REL in this instance. It’s more important to see that referral data than to have that traffic treated as direct.

      And Google Analytics 360 gives you roll-up reporting, but the free version doesn’t.

      Reply

    • If I understand you correctly, it’s just one website with two subdomains, not two websites. If they have the same GA tracking code and domain.com is listed in the REL, you should get very few self-referrals. If that’s the case, the referral would be intact. If you’re still getting a significant number of self-referrals and you have your domain listed in the REL, then you have a more serious tracking issue.

      Reply

  14. Excellent post. I was wondering why traffic from a few of my owned domains that I added to the referral exclusion list still showed as referral. Looks like it is because of that little cookie that still resides on users’ browser.

    Also, the Tag Assistant was very useful in helping to quickly find out if everything works fine.

    Thanks.

    Reply

  15. Hi Annie

    I posted a question re the referral exclusion list a few days ago which did not make it onto your site. That is totally cool. I just wanted to let you know that i worked out the answer and wanted to share it with you as it’s an interesting scenario and might be useful for viewers of this post in future. You can see the explanation here but it boils down to a site having a page using UA and Classic Analytics at one. The fact that the referral exclusion list only works with UA is not often mentioned, and in this case the fact that they were called together, once on the actual site domain, and once in a page running behind the scenes, had the effect of generating an ongoing stream of self-referrals.

    https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/t5/forums/v3_1/forumtopicpage/board-id/Referral_Spam_Traffic/thread-id/1559#M1583

    Anyway, completely up to you if you want to mention this.

    Thanks
    Garry

    Reply

    • Hi Gary,

      This is the only question I have from you, and I did answer it: https://www.screencast.com/t/6SyJI1Zpk. And once you leave a comment, any followup comments don’t get moderated, so if you had left another question/comment, it would have been published without review.

      And I did mention that this is a feature of Universal in the post (screenshot: https://www.screencast.com/t/KOhAjoXkb). But you shouldn’t have pages “in the background” firing anything, especially not a different version of GA. These are going to cause duplication in your GA reports, and running two different versions of GA is going to compromise the integrity of your data.

      Reply

  16. Quick question 🙂 Does using referral exclusions affect the google ranking of a website?

    We have a web application with multiple domains that redirects the user on logout to the website. These are coming in as the biggest referrals and I am wanting to exclude them. While they are from proper customers/clients and are useful from a UX standpoint, they don’t hold the same value as referrals from our campaigns/adwords and listings on other websites etc.

    Thanks,
    Sam

    Reply

  17. Hi, This is a very helpful article! I have two different analytics properties set up for my domain (domain.com) and my blog (blog.domain.com). Each has the domain.com on the referral exclusion list, but not only am I not seeing one refer traffic to the other, I also can’t see traffic through sessions between them. Basically, I have no idea how traffic is moving from the blog to the site and back again. Any suggestions?

    Reply

  18. Hi Anni,

    My website thezurihotels.com also facing same issue.
    Self referral traffic is too high and booking medium also showing “thezurihotels.com / referral” (For payment we are using third party.)
    Domain add in Self-Referrals list, but its not helping.
    Please guide my to come over that issue.

    Thanks in advance
    Parbesh

    Reply

    • By ‘self-referrals list’ are you referring the Referral Exclusion List? Can you post a screenshot of your REL?

      Reply

  19. Hi, Annie. Great post – thanks for documenting!

    Is there any way to get around the referral exclusion list being at the property level? I am trying to create 2 different views: One view with 1 domain’s singular visitor data (no cross-domain tracking included) and then a second view with all of the aggregate cross-domain tracking data. Ultimately, I’m trying to preserve an overarching view of visitor behavior within one domain.

    I’d love any ideas or insight you might have!

    Cheers,
    Meredith

    Reply

  20. Hi Annie,

    I have a domain with one subdomain that is showing a ton of self-referral traffic in analytics, despite the fact that the domain is included on the Referral Exclusion list. Do you know why that is?

    Thanks

    Reply

    • Not without looking at it. If your REL is set up properly, it could be caused by having that subdomain on a different property or having pages on that sub that are missing your tracking snippet.

      Reply

  21. My company website has ecommerce (www.thewodlife.com.au) and blog (blog.thewodlife.com.au) subdomains that are tracked using two different GA account numbers. Additionally, our website is listed in the referral exclusion list. If someone clicks into the ecommerce site from the blog and then converts, what channel ultimately gets credit for that conversion? Is that traffic (and subsequent conversion) completely excluded from the GA data or does it get credited to Direct traffic? What would be the best way to track any conversions from those that come from the blog?

    Reply

    • If you have your subdomains in separate properties you need to use just the subdomain in the REL. Otherwise, referrals from your other subdomain(s) will show up as direct. I would also create a custom channel for your own traffic, so it doesn’t get lost in your Referrals report.

      Reply

  22. Annie, I have a site that we send users to for registration. It’s a sub-domain, but it refers back to the main site to complete a transaction/conversion. I set it up in referral exclusions and it’s still not falling out of reporting. Can you give me an idea of why this is as I didn’t see your post explain that/I might have missed the explanation. Agreed in the use of cross domain here, but was hoping this would take care of it witout having to add that piece of tracking.

    thanks,

    Anand

    Reply

    • When you say it’s a subdomain, do you mean it’s a subdomain of the main site? If so, the subdomain is included when you add your domain to the REL. (And Google actually did this by default.) If it’s a subdomain of a different domain, that’s another story.

      Reply

  23. Hi,
    I am confused: if I am seeing my own URL as a top referral and add it to the REL, will that traffic and all other GA metrics be suppressed or show up uin Direct? Additionally,, is putting my own URL in the REL just be “masking” the larger issue of why it is happening?

    Question #2 – We recently moved from HTTP to HTTPS and still see some SEO traffic coming in on HTTP – would this show up as our own URL referring traffic?

    Question #3 – If yes or no to #2 – how does, if at all, provisional headers with a “no-referrer-when-downgraded” policy affect this?

    Thanks so much!!

    Reply

  25. THANK YOU so much for this article. The tag assistant solved ALL my problems! I was vexed over dealing with PayPal attribution for the entire week.

    Reply

  27. I have 2 websites: domain1.com and domain2.com. Rather than keeping the 2 separate websites, we have created a landing page on domain1.com (ie. domain1.com/landing-page/) and are now 301 domain forwarding domain2.com to that landing page.

    We are using the domain2.com url in our Facebook advertisiing. Should we add domain2.com to our REL? Will doing so keep Facebook as the referral source, or will it simply lose all referral information and record it as direct traffic?

    Reply

    • If domain2.com is redirecting to domain1.com, Facebook is most likely already showing up as the referral. You can use the Real Time reports (I show how here: http://bit.ly/2P5u3IR) or Google’s Tag Assistant to confirm.

      Reply

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