Referral Exclusion List - Data Questsion

[K2_Sports]

This may seem like a silly question. Since we are having an issue with self-referrals, we checked all the pages and everything is tagged properly, I used the referral exclusion list to exclude our domains. Question is, since we had a large number of our revenue coming in from the self-referring traffic, what happens to that revenue data once I add our domains to the referral exclusion list?

[K2_Sports]

That make sense. Thanks so much for your insights, much appreciated.

[Hutch42]

Bought better code, the old galleries had been a hack job by a previous agency, we bought new clean code, customized it for our needs.  We also upgraded from using on-page analytic code to Google Tag Manager at the same time which made all future tracking updates much easier and cheaper.

[K2_Sports]

You are awesome! How did you end up fixing the java galleries issue?

[Hutch42]

As a best practice you should, and while I do not think it will fix your data, who knows it might. The problem will be, if it does not give you better insight now, all it will do is split up this unknown data into 2 separate groups in your data instead of just one.

[K2_Sports]

That is a great suggestion. I will look into that as well. I am not sure if that is an issue for us but at this point I am willing to look at anything. So do you think that I should not have added our domains to the referral exclusion list then?

[Hutch42]

I had a similar problem on a site awhile ago, the issue was not with the analytics code but with the site which had a large amount of java galleries and procedurally generated content which would somehow create small interstitial pages when generating pages and redirect from them to the actual pages.

[K2_Sports]

We have checked the tracking on all pages. Updated the tracking on our blog. The only thing I can think of would be updating any event tracking we have as I understand it is sending the old code. Any other ideas? Is there a fast way to dbl check that our tracking code is correct on all pages?

[Hutch42]

It will depend on how/why it is saying you are a referral source to yourself.  There most likely is a larger issue with how your site is functioning that is causing a disconnect to happen that just removing yourself as a referral will not solve.  If there is still a break in your tracking then it will see it as a new session with no source information and attribute conversions to (not found) or something similar.  To fix the issue you are going to need to understand why your analytics program thinks you are sending yourself traffic and fix that problem first, then you will be able to get real and actionable data on what your main conversions drivers are.