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In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), there’s no direct way to see referral traffic from your blog to your main site if they’re being tracked as separate properties because GA4 doesn’t automatically treat subdomains as referral traffic like Universal Analytics (previous version) did. However, you can get around this by customizing the referral exclusions.
To do this, you first need to go to your GA4 property and click on ‘Admin’. In the ‘Property’ column, you click on ‘Data Streams’ and then select your web data stream. Inside of that, there’s an option ‘More tagging settings’. You’ll then see ‘Referral exclusions’. By default, your main domain is likely to be in the ‘Referral exclusions’, which means any traffic from blog.mainsite.com wouldn’t be counted as referrals to mainsite.com.
You can remove mainsite.com from ‘Referral exclusions’ to treat your blog site as a referral source. This way, any sessions initiated from your blog site will show as a referral in your GA4 reports. But keep in mind that this might affect how sessions are calculated since a user moving from mainsite.com to blog.mainsite.com and then back to mainsite.com could be counted as two separate sessions.
Consequently, it’s important to recognize that this configuration’s benefits and downsides, and ensure that it matches with your reporting needs. For more precise data collection, you might want to consider implementing cross-domain tracking, which can provide a more complete picture of user behavior across your main site and blog. However, setting that up can be quite technical and might require assistance from a developer or an analytics expert.
