Google Analytics Audit Test #

87

No Payment Processors as Referrals

Why It Matters:

Critical to understanding where your traffic is coming from and assigning appropriate credit.

Industries:

Ecommerce/Product-Led SaaS/Other

Checks For:

Accuracy

How accurate is your recent data?

Insight Category:

Attribution

Can you tell which marketing efforts are working?

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Background

A GA4 audit is essential for uncovering missing insights—key data points that organizations don't yet know and can act upon. A well-done audit evaluates both behavioral tracking and traffic attribution, ensuring each is accurate and useful. It also assesses whether the data collected truly supports business decisions and reporting.

Test Detail

This test checks whether traffic from payment processors (e.g., PayPal, Stripe, Klarna) is incorrectly showing up in your GA4 reports as referral traffic.

This happens when users leave your site to complete payment and return via a new session without attribution settings configured properly—causing conversions to be credited to the payment processor instead of the original source (e.g., Google Ads, Email, Organic Search).

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How to Conduct This Test

Basic Tests

  • In GA4, go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
  • Look under Session source/medium or Session source and scan for:
    • paypal.com
    • checkout.stripe.com
    • klarna.com
    • shop.app
    • or other similar processors
  • If these sources are appearing and associated with conversions, your attribution is being overwritten.

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Want to make sure your data is crediting the right channel? Hire a pro to investigate and clean it up.

How To Fix

  • In Google Analytics, go to Admin > Data Streams > [your stream] > More tagging settings > List unwanted referrals.
  • Add common payment processors to the list:
    • paypal.com
    • checkout.stripe.com
    • shop.app
    • klarna.com
    • Any additional gateways used by your store
  • This tells GA4 to treat sessions from these domains as part of the same user session instead of starting a new one and overwriting attribution.
  • Hire a pro to audit your referral exclusions and protect the integrity of your conversion data.

Tips from a Google Analytics Consultant

Focus on Insights

Every Google Analytics audit should result in a plan for more insights.

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An insight is:

  • something you don't know
  • and can act on to improve performance

The Goal

Identify and remove insight blockers. Don't get tempted to track things you can't act on!

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