You open the traffic sources report in Google Analytics and see something strange: among the sources that brought buyers there is no Google and no Instagram, but liqpay.ua. The person did not search for anything on the LiqPay page. They simply paid and came back to you. Yet the sale is credited to the payment service. The ad that brought this customer looks, in the report, as if it sold nothing.
This is one of those small things that make people judge advertising by the wrong numbers. It can be fixed in a few minutes, and the website owner can do it personally. Below: why it happens, what exactly to click, which domains to look for, and what this changes and what it does not. We checked the Google Analytics and Google Ads help on 18 October 2026.
Why the payment service “takes” the sale
When a person pays for an order, they leave your website for the payment provider’s page (Google’s help calls it a third-party payment processor). After paying, they return to your site, to the “Thank you for your order” page. From Analytics’ point of view, this is a new visit that came from another site, that is, from the payment provider’s domain.
In Google’s help, such visits are called “referrals”. According to the help, Analytics automatically recognizes where the person was immediately before arriving on your site and displays the domain name of that site as the referral source. In the report it looks like a row such as “liqpay.ua / referral”. The help itself mentions our exact case: an ecommerce site uses a third-party payment processor, and users return to the site after checking out on the third-party domain.
How to fix it: five clicks
The setting is called “List unwanted referrals”. You tell Analytics: do not treat visits from these domains as a traffic source. You need the Editor role or above at the property level (that is what Analytics calls your website with all its settings). If a contractor handled your site and you cannot see the buttons you need, you lack permissions. That is one more reason accounts should be registered to your own email.
The path according to Google’s help in English:
- Open analytics.google.com, choose your property and click “Admin”.
- Under “Data collection and modification”, click “Data streams”, then “Web”, and choose your website’s stream.
- At the bottom of the stream details, click “Configure tag settings”.
- In the “Settings” section, click “Show all”.
- Click “List unwanted referrals”, choose a match type, enter the payment provider’s domain in the “Domain” field and save. To add another one, click “Add condition”. The conditions work with OR logic: matching any one is enough.
Limit: up to 50 unwanted referrals per data stream. Button names depend on the interface version and may differ slightly, so follow the order of the steps.
Which domains to add
You can see the payment provider’s domain in the same traffic sources report: these are rows like “something.ua / referral” that coincide in time with payments. Examples we checked on 18 October 2026 (the sites responded):
- LiqPay: liqpay.ua;
- WayForPay: wayforpay.com (the site responds, although it is closed to automated checks);
- Monobank: pay.mbnk.biz and mbnk.biz.
A provider may have several domains, so do not guess: look at which one actually appeared in your report. We do not include Fondy and other providers: their addresses did not respond normally during our check, and guessed domains are better left out of the settings.
What this changes and what it does not
New visits. After you save, visits from the listed domains will stop being counted as referrals. According to the help, Analytics adds a service parameter ignore_referrer=true to such events, which says: this address should not appear as a traffic source.
Old data. The help does not say that past sales are recalculated, and it gives an example that points the other way. A user arrived from Domain B before it was added to the list, and the first visit was attributed to B. Then the domain was added, and the person came back directly, via a bookmark. The second visit was also attributed to B, because of the last-non-direct-click attribution model. So expect old rows in your reports to stay, and the new order to show up in fresh data. How long after saving the setting starts to work, the help does not specify. Check after a day or two.
Google Ads advertising. Be careful here, because there is some ambiguity in this topic. Practitioners write that the payment service “takes” the sale from the ad: the session brought by the ad is repainted by Analytics as the service’s. Google Analytics’ help on the unwanted referrals list only says that the domain is displayed as a referral source. It says nothing about overriding the advertising source or about Google Ads conversions.
What is known from the Google Ads help on auto-tagging: when a person clicks an ad, a click identifier (GCLID) is added to the address and stored in a cookie on your site’s domain. For sites with redirects, the help requires passing it on to the final landing page, and this is needed for conversion tracking. Hence our conclusion: conversions recorded by the Google Ads tag rely on the click identifier, not on what Analytics wrote in the “source” column. But this is our conclusion, not a quotation from the help. We found no direct confirmation in the help that the unwanted referrals list does not touch Google Ads conversions at all. And if you import events from Analytics into Google Ads, that is Analytics’ own data, and a difference is possible there.
From our practice
For stores where payment happens on an external page, we check this item during the initial Analytics setup, next to counters and events. This is experience, not statistics: we have not counted how often it occurs. The report itself suggests the domains, and the fix takes a few minutes.
Three neighbouring traps
Do not put ignore_referrer on every page. The help explains that this parameter can be added to the code manually, but most site owners do not need to do this, and adding it to all pages is not advised: you may lose valuable information about traffic sources. For payment providers, the list in the interface is more convenient.
A password-reset email also produces a “referral”. The help gives one more example: a user receives an email, clicks the link, and traffic from the email domain returns to the site. Such mail is not a source of customers. If you see email service domains in the report, you can add them to the list too.
Reopening the “Thank you” page. If a person refreshes it or returns to it, the conversion tag may fire a second time. According to the Google Ads help, a unique ID is used for this, for example an order number: if the second conversion has the same ID, Google Ads recognizes a duplicate and does not count it. Ask your contractor whether the order number is passed along with the purchase conversion.
Summary: what to do today
- Open the traffic sources report and look for payment service domains marked “referral”.
- If you find any, add them to the unwanted referrals list following the steps above.
- After a day or two, look at fresh sales: the row with the payment service should disappear from the new data.
- Ask your contractor: is the order number passed along with the purchase conversion, and is the click identifier preserved after redirects?
We wrote about what else should be connected to your site in the checklist for owners. How to pass sales back to Google is in the article on offline conversions. How we set up measurement is described on the web analytics page, and we run advertising in the sections on search advertising and Performance Max.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request — we will look at your account and tell you whether sales are counted correctly and what is worth fixing.