Should I filter these self referrals?

[HoosierBuff]

Hi,

This is tangentially local SEO, but, I've posted on Google's forum and gotten nothing.

I have a bank, and they are showing referrals from the online banking software (which is on a different domain than the bank itself). The referrals come from users who exit the online bank, and then are referred back to the banks domain.

I am wondering if I should put the online bank on the self referral list. Where I'm slightly hung up is, I feel like if I am a user, and I went to bank domain > Online Bank Domain > bank domain then, wouldn't that not count as a referral because the session is likely still active? and if so should I not exclude those referrals?

I'm trying to make sure the data is clean, but, don't want to wipe out legitimate traffic. As far as I can tell, few people start on the online bank domain without going to the main bank domain first.

 

[CarrieHill]

I'm not sure of an exact answer to this but I have a few questions that might help you get to a conclusion?

Why would you need to track a user that goes bank domain>online bank domain> bank domain?

Do you need to know if they are abandoning before they come back? Does that indicate a programming issue you need to solve? If you add as a self-referral, does it hide these from you?

If you did add to the self-referral list, what data would you lose?

Can you try it for a week or so (or a few days, depends upon volume) and see if it has any impact on the data you use to measure your activities and KPIs?

Can you set this up in a different view for a while to see the impact without causing issues with your main data view?

Hope this is helpful - it sounds like it would be okay, but with data, there are a lot of variables that could be affected.

Carrie