GA4 Referral Exclusions: How to Exclude Unwanted Referrals

Referral traffic comes from people who reach your website from another domain, rather than through a search engine. Excluding referrals means setting up conditions that identify unwanted referrers (for example your own domain or your payment gateway) and stop them from being counted as referral traffic. Without this, a customer who comes from a Google ad, pays through Stripe or PayPal and returns to your thank-you page can get credited to “stripe.com / referral” instead of the campaign that brought them.

How to exclude referrals in GA4

1. To set up the unwanted referrals list in Google Analytics 4, open your GA4 property.

2. Go to Admin in the left-hand menu.

3. In the Property column, click Data Streams.

4. Select the data stream you want to configure the list for.

5. Scroll down and click Configure tag settings.

6. Click Show all.

7. Click List unwanted referrals.

You should see a window like the one below:

8. Enter the domain you want to exclude in the Domain field and click Save.

9. To exclude more domains, click List unwanted referrals again, select the list that appears and click Add condition.

Traffic from the domains you added will no longer show up as referral traffic.

Payment providers and third-party form tools that are not excluded can credit sales to the wrong source and distort how you judge an entire campaign. It is one of the first things we check in a marketing audit.