Self-Reffering Traffic After upgrading to Universal Analytics

[K2_Sports]

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

[K2_Sports]

As for the event tracking...that can also cause self-referrals with the old code, yes?

[K2_Sports]

Thank you all, I have read conflicting information on adding our domains to the exclusion list. I will do that for sure.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Melissa, are you also aware of the fact that all event tracking events are still fired via the old code for Classic Analytics?

[RyanPurkey]

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.

[KevinBudzynski]

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!