How to Exclude Payment Referrers?

When it comes down to Google Analytics, it’s needless to say that medium and source reports are the most common. That’s the reason they are targeted by the spammers. However, there is a common issue with these reports, known as improper attribution of transactions and conversions. In fact, the payment gateway implementation needs some traffic to be directed to your payment gateway. However, many people still don’t understand how they can exclude payment referrers, and we are sharing the guide to help you!

Excluding the Payment Referrers

There are two methods for excluding the payment referrers, and we are sharing an in-depth guide on both of them.

Using the Referral Exclusion List

In case you are using Universal Analytics, the ideal way is to use the Referral Exclusions feature. You can easily access it through the Google Analytics page from the Admin tab. In particular, from the Admin tab, you’ve to open the tracking info and tap on the referral exclusion list. At this point, you’ve to add the hostname.

The hostname can either be a subdomain or a domain name – you can add it to the list. As a result, the visit will not begin when you start a new session if an active session is already in the works.

Using the utm_nooverride=1

Before the launch of Universal Analytics, this was the only possible way to exclude payment referrers. Truth be told, there wasn’t a need for it because Google Analytics wouldn’t begin a session for the same person if the previous one isn’t expired yet. Anyways, utm_nooverride=1 is a well-known parameter which can be attached to the return pages of the payment gateways.

For instance, if the URL of payment processing is /checkout/payment/payment processing, the URL should be /checkout/payment/payment processing/utm_nooverride=1. As a result, Google will be able to ignore the information related to a payment referrer, especially when there is already a session in the works. Truth be told, this wasn’t the reason behind this parameter’s launch, but it works fine.

Keep in mind that you’ve to do this for every link on the payment gateway site. However, you should use this method only if you are using Google Analytics because it doesn’t work well for Universal Analytics.

Reason to Exclude Payment Referrers

Now that we have mentioned two ways of excluding payment referrers, it’s important to understand the reason. It is important to ensure that you can see the original traffic. That’s because if you don’t exclude the payment referrers, you won’t be able to check out the original traffic source, which was responsible for completing the transactions.

This means that rather than seeing fifty organic transactions, you will see 150 transactions from different payment gateways. Many people think that they can extract the data using attribution modeling tools, but why not make your life easier? Also, when you delete the payment referrers, it will be easier to prevent data pollution.

The Bottom Line

On a concluding note, it’s pretty convenient to exclude the referrers, and we have shared two methods. If you use Universal Analytics, use the exclusion list, but the parameter is recommended for Google Analytics users.