GA4 & Referrer Traffic
Hi, I’m back, and boy is there a lot to cover! In the past year (or two years, it’s been a minute), the SEO landscape has changed quite a bit. From the announcement of the deprecation of 3rd party cookies, to Google’s move to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the introduction of ChatGPT/Bard (the list goes on), and humans thinking they will lose their SEO job to AI (they won’t), it’s safe to say digital marketing has entered a new era. I’ll touch on all of those topics at a later date, but let’s start with GA4…
Google Analytics, the UA version, was easy as pie. It allowed marketers and businesses to accurately add conversion events, didn’t confuse those marketers on the term “event” versus “conversions,” and was a much easier install process. Now, businesses need to tag their sites with a measurement ID seen in their GA4 admin tab under “Data Streams,” make their own conversion goals based on a series of actions, and much more. Google Analytics 4 also made the admin tab/settings cog harder to navigate (maybe just my opinion?), which caused confusion on where to exclude IP addresses for internal users, how to block traffic, how to add events, and even where to add new users to the dashboard.
In February 2024, marketers or businesses may have received a spike in referral traffic, which is anyone’s worst nightmare when it comes to bounce rate measurement and long-term tracking. The majority of this fake traffic was caused by a bot spike from News.Grets.Store via the “referrer” channel. What is referral traffic? I’m glad you asked. The referral traffic channel is where most folks come visit the site from backlinks, whether they were purposeful backlinks or gained backlinks. In many cases, backlinks could be traced back to your website being published on an online newspaper or a directory like YellowPages. These are fine until your website link is published as a gained backlink from spammy websites, creating lots of bot traffic and huge bounce rates. BUT WHERE DO I BLOCK MY REFERRAL TRAFFIC?
Blocking Referrer Traffic
Because GA4 is so complicated, you can bet that blocking referral traffic is a pain to find. Have no fear, iRank is here!
When you log into GA4, you can block referral traffic (or set up cross-domain tracking or add IP addresses, etc) right from the Data Streams link as seen in the “Admin” section of GA4. From there, you will click into your site, go to your tag settings, hit the “Show More” button in your tag settings, then click on “List Unwanted Referrals”. See screenshots below!
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Until next time!