Self-Reffering Traffic After upgrading to Universal Analytics
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Backstory: We have always had an issue with self-referring traffic but in waiting for the UA upgrade we put it on the backburner for getting fixed.
We have now upgraded to UA and I was under the impression that GA would automatically exclude the domain associated with a property as a referral source. However this is not what I am seeing under my referral traffic source. With 10 websites having issues with this I need some help. Should I use the referral exclusion list? Also on a handful of our sites we have region specific URLs, I am also seeing these come in as self-referring traffic. I should also mention that about 85% of our sales are being attributed to the self-referring traffic.
Here are two sites for example sake: ZootSports.com and K2snowboarding.com
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As for the event tracking...that can also cause self-referrals with the old code, yes?
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Thank you all, I have read conflicting information on adding our domains to the exclusion list. I will do that for sure.
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Melissa, are you also aware of the fact that all event tracking events are still fired via the old code for Classic Analytics?
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Hi Melissa. You'll want to go into the Admin >> Property >> .js Tracking Info >> Referral Exclusion List and add in the domain(s) you want to exclude, such as zootsports.com, www.zootsports.com, k2snowboarding.com... and so on. If you take a look at your current referral traffic in GA Reports section you should find a fairly complete list. For example, you might have mobile domains as well, things like, m.k2.... etc.
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Yes, you can place the domain in the exclusion list. Best practice is to try to identify the root cause (missing/incorrect tracking code, redirects, self referrals, subdomain & etc.). Good luck!
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