Analytics Checkout Referral Platforms: What, Why, and How to Remove

What are checkout referrals, and why should you remove them?

Checkout referrals are erroneous line items that can receive revenue attribution in your analytics platform when not excluded. They can appear when a user selects a particular payment or verification option in the checkout flow (such as ID verification, buy now pay later platforms, or payment vendors). Despite a user remaining within the checkout flow, these referrals can "break" the user journey and restart the user's visit and create a new session within analytics platforms. Any conversion and revenue is then incorrectly attributed to these sources rather than being attributed to the user's original source. We suggest removing checkout referrals to have accurate reporting across all your channels, including WKND.

• Ex: A user clicks through a Wunderkind email and gets into the checkout flow. They opt to use Affirm to pay for their purchase. Affirm has their own checkout flow within the client’s flow, which adds new UTMs to the user’s URL. Because of that, it now appears that this user came to the site via Affirm, when in reality, they had their UTMs changed part way through checkout.
• Vendors to lookout for: Afterpay, Klarna, PayPal, Google/Amazon Pay, Shop Pay, Global-E, etc.

These line items will typically be driving very minimal traffic to site (<5%), have high conversion rates (>20%), and have a disproportionately high portion of revenue in comparison to traffic (ex. revenue is 10%, but traffic is less than 1%).

How do we remove them?

We recommend using GA4 and Adobe's resources to remove these sources from your reporting views. 
*Note that this process will remove these referral sources moving forward and not retroactively. 

• GA Link
• Adobe Link
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