What is Referral Exclusion List?
A configuration setting (now managed under 'List unwanted referrals' in GA4) that tells analytics to ignore specific domains as valid traffic sources to prevent broken attribution.
When an e-commerce customer goes to checkout, they are often temporarily redirected to a third-party payment gateway like paypal.com or stripe.com. Once payment is complete, they are sent back to your website's "Thank You" page.
If you don't configure your Referral Exclusions, GA4 will look at that return trip, see paypal.com as the referring domain, strip away the original Facebook Ad that brought the customer in, and attribute the revenue to "Referral -> Paypal".
By adding payment gateways to the "List Unwanted Referrals" configuration, GA4 knows to ignore the gateway and preserve the original traffic source.
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