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Referral Exclusions and Filters
After creating data streams for a GA4 property, preserve data integrity and clarity by removing distracting traffic generated by automated apps, integrated tools, or internal developers.
Key Tasks
- Exclude unwanted referrals for a property, such as payment vendor traffic, automation tools, etc. whose traffic doesn’t represent true referrals of relevant user traffic
- Exclude unwanted referrals for specific events by appending the ignore_referrer parameter to individual pages or events set to “true.”
- Filter internal traffic for a property
Tag Settings Dialog
Overview
A legacy UA implementation likely has multiple referral exclusions or an internal filter to ensure data streams do not mix targeted visitor traffic with internal developer or utility app traffic. Exclusions and filters are critical to maintaining clean data, are simple to set up, and must be validated prior to impacting the data stream. Exclusions and filters should be tested before changing data. Ensure that adequate definition is conducted before enacting changes to a business data stream.
Exclude Unwanted Referrals (Property Level)
Often a website uses third-party domains to process payments or to provide automation apps. Traffic to your site that comes from a third-party domain displays in the referrals traffic segment. To ensure your data includes only referrals in which you’re interested, you can exclude these unwanted referrals from your data. To configure unwanted referrals, navigate to your web data stream, and select Configure tag settings > Show all. Click List unwanted referrals and select match condition(s) and domain(s). For example: “contains” “paypal”.
If you are uncertain which domains need referral exclusion, review your User Acquisition report with page_referrer (previous page URL) dimension added. By reviewing all referring sources, you can identify payment gateways, tools and apps domains that do not represent additional unique users.
User Acquisition Report - Page Referrer
Exclude Unwanted Referrals (Event Level)
While unwanted referrals are usually set globally (e.g., filter all paypal transaction traffic), you may need to ignore referrers only in certain situations. You can append an ignore_referrer parameter to individual pages or events and set it to true. For example, to ignore a referrer on a specific page, add the parameter to the config command:
Google notes that most site owners will not need to do this. Do not append the parameter manually if unsure of the function and how it impacts data streams. The specific circumstance for such a localized exclusion is unique and should be carefully defined before implementing manual exclusions across pages.
Exclude Internal Traffic
Since GA is most often used to track external customers and users interacting with your website, internal traffic is typically distracting when mixed with prospect and customer traffic. Filtering out internal traffic makes analytics easier to understand customer behavior.
When a GA4 property is created, a filter for internal traffic is also created. The filter defines any traffic with the parameter traffic_type with a value of internal. To trigger the filter, users need only create a rule to identify which traffic matches that parameter value.
Internal Traffic Definition Dialog
To filter internal traffic, you must define internal traffic, and then exclude that traffic. Define internal traffic by navigating to your data stream and selecting Configure tag settings > Define internal traffic, and enter your IP address configuration. Create the filter by navigating to Data Settings > Data Filters, and select Internal traffic exclude.
Filtering app developer traffic
App developer traffic is identified by different parameters, debug_mode or debug_event set to 1. The filtered traffic remains visible in DebugView, so developers can still verify their work.
Validate Exclusions and Internal Filters
Filters can be in Testing, Active, or Inactive mode. While in testing mode, traffic is evaluated, and the matching traffic is identified with a filter-specific dimension name. To test any filter, add the comparably named dimension filter to your traffic report to verify filter definition results.
Event-specific elements can be viewed in DebugView whether captured by Google tag, Google Tag Manager (GTM), or GA for Firebase.
