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How to Filter Unwanted Referral Traffic in Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Learn how to exclude spam and unwanted referral traffic in Google Analytics 4. Clean up your future reports by following this step-by-step guide.

If your Google Analytics reports are being skewed by "spam" traffic or internal domains that shouldn't be counted as referrals, you can use the List Unwanted Referrals feature. This ensures that when a reader arrives from a specific domain, the session is not treated as a new referral, helping keep your data clean and accurate.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Follow these steps to exclude specific domains from your referral traffic reports:

  1. Access Admin Settings: Open Google Analytics and click the Admin gear icon in the bottom left corner.

  2. Navigate to Data Streams: Under the Data Collection and Modification section, select Data Streams.

  3. Select Your Stream: Click on the specific web data stream you want to edit.

  4. Configure Tag Settings: Scroll down to the Google Tag section and click on Configure tag settings.

  5. Click on List unwanted referrals.

  6. Add Domains: Choose a match type (e.g., "Referral domain contains").

    • Enter the domain you want to exclude (e.g., spamsite.com).

    • Click Save.

Important Things to Know

  • No Retroactive Changes: This setting will not remove spam traffic from your historical data. It only affects data collected from the moment you save the settings going forward.