How to exclude Montonio referrals from your Google Analytics acquisition reports?

If you’re running an online store and using Montonio as a payment processor, you may notice that Montonio (or any other payment provider for that matter) shows up in your Google Analytics acquisition reports as a referral. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that traffic is coming from Montonio. It simply means that the payment was made through Montonio, but the original traffic source may be from elsewhere.

To get a better understanding of where your customers are coming from, it’s recommended to exclude Montonio and other payment method providers from your Google Analytics acquisition reports. In this post, we’ll go through the steps to exclude montonio.com related referrals from your Google Analytics acquisition reports, for both Google Analytics 4 and Google Analytics 3 (Universal Analytics).

If you haven’t configured it yet, you might see any of the following unwanted referrals in your Google Analytics acquisition (source/medium) reports: payments.montonio.com, paymentsv2.montonio.com, stargate.montonio.com, pay.montonio.com, etc.

Here’s an example of problematic referrals you may see in your Google Analytics reports.

How to exclude montonio.com related referrals from your Google Analytics 4 acquisition reports?

If you’ve installed Google Analytics 4 on your website and you have an “Editor” level access to your GA4 account or property, please follow these steps:

Here you can see the exact instructions on how to configure “montonio.com” as an unwanted referral in Google Analytics 4 property.

Here’s a step-by-step list of instructions:

  1. Go to: https://analytics.google.com/.
  2. Open your Google Analytics account.
  3. Go to the Admin section.
  4. Choose the Google Analytics 4 property.
  5. Click Data Streams in the Property column.
  6. Click Web and then click a web data stream.
  7. In the web stream details, click Configure tag settings (at the bottom).
  8. In the Settings section, click Show all to see all available settings.
  9. Click List unwanted referrals.
  10. Click on the “Add condition”.
  11. Choose “Referral domain matches RegEx” as a match type.
  12. Enter “montonio.com” in the domain field.
  13. Click “Save”.

P.S. If you add “montonio.com” in the domain field along with the “Referral domain matches RegEx” as a match type, it will automatically consider all the possible referrals Montonio can generate in your Google Analytics 4 reports, including all subdomains like payments.montonio.com, paymentsv2.montonio.com, stargate.montonio.com, pay.montonio.com, etc. This means you don’t need to add all those subdomains separately under your “Unwanted referral”. It’s enough to keep only one value “montonio.com”, as described above.

How to exclude montonio.com related referrals from your Google Analytics 3 (Universal Analytics) acquisition reports?

If you’ve installed Google Analytics 3 (Universal Analytics) on your website and you have “Editor” level access to your GA3 account or property, please follow these steps:

Here you can see the exact instructions on how to configure “montonio.com” as an unwanted referral in Google Analytics 3 property.

Here’s a step-by-step list of instructions:

  1. Go to: https://analytics.google.com/.
  2. Open your Google Analytics account.
  3. Go to the Admin section.
  4. Choose the Google Analytics 3 (Universal Analytics) property.
  5. Click Tracking Info in the Property column.
  6. Click Referral Exclusion List.
  7. In the Referral Exclusion List, click “+ADD REFERRAL EXCLUSION”.
  8. Enter “montonio.com” in the domain field.
  9. Click “Save”.

P.S. If you add “montonio.com” in the domain field, it will automatically consider all the possible referrals Montonio can generate in your Google Analytics 3 reports, including payments.montonio.com, paymentsv2.montonio.com, stargate.montonio.com, pay.montonio.com, etc. This means that you don’t need to add all those subdomains separately.

Here you can also read the official documentation: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10327750?hl=en

As you’ve said, I configured the referral exclusion or unwanted referral, but I still see those referrals in my Google Analytics reports. Why is that?

If you’ve configured the unwanted referral or referral exclusion correctly, this referral won’t disappear from your reports immediately.

Keep in mind:

1) This configuration will only affect data going forward so that the past data collected to your Google Analytics won’t be affected. It’s not possible to retroactively delete or edit any data in Google Analytics.

2) You may still see referrals like “payments.montonio.com” or “pay.montonio.com” in your Google Analytics reports related to returning visitors that have already come to your site via those referrals up to 6 months in Google Analytics (depending on the Campaign timeout settings you’ve configured in your GA account).

We hope this article helps avoid or fix the attribution issues in Google Analytics. If you have any questions, feel free to contact our support. We’ll help.

This blog post was co-written with B2B Google Ads Agency Holini.