It is important to make exclusions for your payment gateways in Analytics because the sales through the shop can be applied to these channels. It creates a twisted look of which channels that work for the webshop – and among other things which AdWords campaigns that are performing. Searchmind here gives you a quick guide to this issue.
What is a payment gateway?
A payment gateway is the payment gateway you use on your website. It is different from provider to provider what payment gateway is used – the same goes for CMS to CMS.
How many are there?
Down below, we have made a list with some of the payment gateways that are used the most on the Danish market. Please be aware, that it isn’t a complete list as there exists tons of payment gateways.
Why do you need to exclude them?
When the costumer completes a purchase and checks out of your webshop, the sale will probably be assigned to this payment gateway if a referring exclusion hasn’t been made. This even applies when the costumer actually found the product through AdWords, for instance.
This means that you don’t have any overview of what campaign or channel that actually made the sale. You can still filter your way to what channel that made the sale to the referral for the payment gateway, but it is just a lot of hassle.
Keep an eye on your referrals
Keep an eye on your Google Analytics to ensure that no payment gateway or some other channel turns up. If a payment gateway do come up, and it wasn’t meant to be assigned the sale, you have to update your list of referral exclusions.
Every platform of e-commercial and payment gateway has its own paths, which is why it is important to add new, if there is a need to change CMS or payment gateway. Especially with SSL migration or migration to a new CMS, you might experience that new referring sources will come up on your list.
You do not necessarily need to sit and go through this every week as there often won’t be anything to see. But a good rule of thumb is to do it every time you make a bigger change on your shop.
How do you do it?
To be able to add or edit referral exclusions in Google Analytics, you need a sufficient amount of rights on property level. As a minimum you need to have editorial permission.
Referring exclusions might seem as a difficult area, and you might consider leaving it to a professional bureau to do it. At Searchmind, we have 15 years of online experience and know all the essentials when it comes to Search Engine Optimization and Google Adwords. We can see the big perspective in the small details, which referring exclusions could look like at first glance. And, in the long run, small adjustments done right can have a big impact.
