Reply To: Harnessing GA4: Eliminating Automatically Appended _gl=xxxxxxxxx Suffix from External Links

[Amelia]

The “_gl=xxx” you are seeing is a client/session ID. It’s added by GA to keep IDs consistent across top-level domains, which is a part of cross-domain tracking. Your current setup may be incorrectly flagging all domains for cross-domain tracking, which could be causing the issue.

Here’s how you can address it:

1. Go to Admin and click on Data Streams in the Property column.
2. Next, select Web and then click a web data stream.
3. In the web stream details, navigate to the bottom and click on Configure tag settings.
4. In the Settings section, click on Configure your domains.

This should help you resolve the issue. However, if you still need cross-domain tracking but wish to remove the URL parameter that GA adds, this would require backend support. In that case, your backend would have to maintain the connection and set the GA cookie. It might be a bit complex to set up, but the result is a clean and elegant front-end without the pesky link suffixes.