Referral Problem in Google Analytics

There are ready-made e-commerce websites available, such as Shopify, ideasoft, and ticimax. In this article, I will share with you a solution to the most common referral problem in Google Analytics accounts.

We can view the channels that generated sales by accessing the Google Analytics / Acquisition / All Traffic / Channels screen. This data displays whether the sales on our website originated from organic traffic, paid traffic (Google Ads), or social media.

This solution is applicable to all referral errors. In this article, I will provide an example for Shopify. Users of Ideasoft, Ticimax, or other ready-made e-commerce platforms can also solve the referral problem with the following method.

Upon examination of the weekly sales data of a newly established Shopify website, we have observed the following table. As depicted in the table, 96% of sales are attributed to Referral as the source. However, based on our expertise, we are confident that this data cannot be accurate and there must be an error that needs to be addressed.

To solve this problem, we must first click on "Referral" and find the source of the link. However, the primary reason for such issues on newly established sites is payment gateway services like iyzico. Users may face referral problems when using payment pages.

When I click on the Referral link, the table comes as follows. It is seen that 95% of the sales come from shopify.iyzipay.com. 2% come from social-login.oxiapps.com and the other 2% from api.iyzipay.com.

How to Solve the Analytics Referral Problem?

We need to exclude these links. Here's how to do it:

To perform referral exclusion, you need to add these URLs here by clicking the "Add Referral Exclusion" button by clicking / Tracking Info / Referral Exclusion List under Google Analytics Settings / Property.

URLs Required for Referral Solution

As an example, you can see above that I have directly excluded these URLs to solve this referral problem.

• shopify.com
• shopify.iyzipay.com
• iyzipay.com
• social-login.oxiapps.com
• api.iyzipay.com

If you haven't listened to my podcasts on digital marketing yet, you can do so by clicking here. 🙂