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Guide 203 · Setup · GA4 + Tag Manager

List unwanted referrals in GA4: stop a payment gateway taking credit for the sale

Written November 13, 2026 · 6-minute read

A buyer pays on the payment gateway's domain, comes back to your thank-you page, and GA4 credits the gateway as the source of the sale. List the gateway domain as an unwanted referral and GA4 ignores that referrer, so the visit keeps the source that actually brought the buyer.

Expected signal

After step 7, a buyer who returns from the gateway domain keeps the original source in the reports, and the gateway stops appearing as the referral source for new returns.

Download the reference: the unwanted referrals reference (JSON) (930 bytes, MD5 612e647cdbaa00a61cf3b7a3e5fd6d99). The 6-step setting path, the ceiling and the effect in one file: 50 conditions per stream, and 1 match is enough, because the conditions use OR logic.

What you need

  • The Editor role or above on the property. Configuring unwanted referrals takes an Editor or above at the property level.
  • The domain to exclude, copied from your own reports. Open the Traffic acquisition report and find the gateway domain credited as a referral source. That domain, as it appears there, is the one to list.
  • A domain you cannot tag. This list is for third-party domains in the middle of a visit, like a payment processor or the email domain behind a password-recovery link. A domain of your own that you can tag belongs in cross-domain measurement instead.
  • One list per web stream. The conditions live on the web data stream's tag settings. A property with more than one web stream needs the list on each stream.

The trace

  1. Open the data streams list. In Admin, under Data collection and modification, click Data streams.
  2. Open the web stream. Click Web, then click the web data stream for the site.
  3. Open the tag settings. In the web stream details, click Configure tag settings at the bottom.
  4. Show every setting. In the Settings section, click Show all.
  5. Open the list. Click List unwanted referrals.
  6. Add one condition per domain. Under Include referrals that match ANY of the following conditions, choose a match type, then enter the domain under Domain. Click Add condition for each extra domain. You can configure a maximum of 50 unwanted referrals per data stream, and the conditions are evaluated using OR logic: a referral that matches any one condition is ignored.
  7. Save. Click Save. From now on, Analytics appends the ignore_referrer parameter with a value of true to every event that matches the conditions, and the referrer is not displayed as a traffic source.

Dead ends

DEAD END — EXPECTING THE LIST TO REWRITE OLD SESSIONS. It does not. A user who arrived from the gateway before you listed it keeps that first session attributed to the gateway. If the same user then returns directly, by a bookmark, that second session is also attributed to the gateway, because session attribution follows the last non-direct click. The list fixes new returns, not the history already recorded.

DEAD END — LISTING YOUR OWN DOMAIN TO FIX A SELF-REFERRAL. Analytics already excludes self-referrals on its own: traffic from the same domain or any of its subdomains is not counted as a new referrer, and neither is traffic across domains in a cross-domain setup where the landing page carries the _gl linker parameter. Adding your own domain to this list changes nothing. Two domains of your own need cross-domain measurement, not this list.

DEAD END — SETTING ignore_referrer BY HAND ON EVERY PAGE. The parameter can be set on an individual page or event in the config command, but Google does not recommend setting it without understanding the implications, and never on every page: you can lose the traffic-source record you need. One warning sign that the manual route has gone wrong: setting the parameter to any value at all, even false or 0, still ignores the referrer. There is no off value.

End state

The gateway domain sits in List unwanted referrals on the web stream, inside the 50-condition ceiling, with the conditions joined by OR logic. Buyers who return from that domain keep the source that brought them, and the gateway no longer takes credit for the sale in new sessions.

Sources

  • Analytics Help — Identify unwanted referrals — the payment processor and website-managed interaction cases, the Data streams to Configure tag settings to List unwanted referrals path, the Editor role, the 50-per-stream maximum, the OR logic, the ignore_referrer=true effect, the last-non-direct-click note for returning users, the automatic self-referral exclusions, and the warning that any ignore_referrer value ignores the referrer