GA4 Referral Exclusion List: When and How to Use It

What the Referral Exclusion List Does

In GA4, when a user arrives on your site from a referral domain, GA4 normally starts a new session and attributes it to that referral source.

The referral exclusion list changes this behaviour for specified domains: instead of starting a new session with the excluded domain as the source, GA4 continues the existing session and preserves the original attribution from earlier in the user's journey.

The most common use case is payment processors. When a user on your site clicks "Pay now," they are redirected to a payment gateway (PayPal, Stripe checkout, Klarna, etc. ).

After completing payment, they are redirected back to your order confirmation page.

Without the payment processor's domain on the exclusion list, GA4 sees the return from the payment gateway as a new session starting from the payment processor as the referral source, attributing the conversion to the payment processor rather than to whatever channel actually drove the user to your site.

This causes the payment processor to appear as a top referral source with a very high conversion rate, while the real acquisition channel gets no conversion credit.

Which Domains Typically Need Exclusion

Payment processors are the most urgent exclusion need for e commerce properties: PayPal, Stripe, Klarna, Afterpay, Clearpay, Worldpay, Braintree, and any other payment gateway that redirects users away from and back to your site.

The second category is your own domains and subdomains that are not configured for cross domain tracking, if you have a subdomain (app. yourdomain. com, checkout. yourdomain.

com) that is not in the linked domains list, visits from that subdomain will appear as referrals rather than continuing the same session.

Third-party booking and scheduling tools embedded in your site that redirect to external domains mid journey also need exclusion. Single sign on providers (auth0. com, accounts. google. com, okta.

com) are worth checking, if your login flow redirects users through an SSO provider, the post login session may appear to start from the SSO domain as a referral.

How to Configure and Verify the Exclusion List

In GA4, the referral exclusion list is configured in Admin, Data Streams, your web stream, Configure tag settings, List unwanted referrals. Add each domain without the protocol prefix (e. g., paypal.

com, not https://paypal. com). GA4 also supports wildcard patterns if you need to exclude multiple subdomains of the same domain.

After adding exclusions, verify they are working by testing the full user journey: go through a purchase to the payment gateway and back, then check DebugView to confirm that the post payment page view continues the same session rather than starting a new one attributed to the payment processor.

Also check your referral report over the following week to confirm the payment processor's referral traffic drops to near zero, any remaining referral sessions from that domain indicate users arriving via the payment gateway without an active GA4 session to continue, which is expected for deep link arrivals but should represent only a small fraction of total payment processor referrals.