If you have an eCommerce store, you’ve probably noticed traffic coming from arcot.com or any of its subdomains like secure5.arcot.com. In this T-Time video, Mark answers some frequently asked questions like:
- What is arcot.com?
- Is arcot.com safe?
- Why are you seeing sales from arcot.com in Google Analytics?
- How can you remove arcot.com from your Analytics data?
What is arcot.com?
(0:51) If you’re seeing a list of subdomains from arcot.com in your Google Analytics account, there’s no need to worry – it’s a payment validation service. As a result, it usually only shows up for eCommerce stores.
You will only see arcot.com on Google Analytics as a source of referral traffic because when a user comes to your site and pays for a product with a credit card, they may be redirected to complete their payment. Arcot.com’s servers then return the customer to your website as a referral.
Is arcot.com safe?
(1:34) Yes, it’s 100% safe. Arcot.com is a partner of Visa, so there’s nothing to worry about. Your website isn’t getting fake traffic and it’s not a scam.
Why are you seeing sales from arcot.com in Google Analytics?
(1:49) Google Analytics will attribute sales and their value to the source of a user’s last click to the website. If a customer is clicking on a Google Shopping ad, landing on your product page, adding something to their cart and paying, they may be redirected to another site, like arcot.com, to complete the transaction.
When the user returns to your website, they are being referred from arcot.com’s domain. By default, this traffic is categorised as a referral by Google Analytics and starts a new session. However, this causes problems when you evaluate your data because sales are being attributed to the wrong source – customers will never have come to your site directly from arcot.com.
To view the traffic Google Analytics thinks is coming from arcot.com, open your Google Analytics dashboard and head to Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals. The table that comes up will show you the sources of your referral traffic and the transactions attributed to each of them.
Another place you can see this is by going to Conversions, then clicking on Multi-Channel Funnels and opening the Model Comparison Tool. Click on ‘referral’ in the table to see your individual referral sources. If you then compare last interaction with first interaction, you can see that arcot.com is never the first click that leads to a sale.
Changing the Attribution Model to linear will give you a much clearer picture. Linear Attribution divides each conversion equally by the number of clicks it took to achieve it. For instance, if a user has come from Google Shopping and then was referred from arcot.com, Google Ads will get half the credit while the payment service gets the other half. This proves that all of arcot.com’s traffic has come from somewhere else first, be it Google Ads, Bing, email marketing, organic search and so on.
How can you remove arcot.com from your Analytics data?
(6:00) Assuming you have admin access:
- Head to the Admin section of your Google Analytics dashboard
- Click on Tracking Info
- Open the Referral Exclusion List. Here you can specify domains that you want Google to stop counting as a referral. This won’t stop traffic coming to you from those sites, but instead tells
- Analytics to ignore those particular clicks and attribute the conversions to the previous click.
- To add a domain to this list, you just need to click ‘Add referral exclusion’
- Put ‘arcot.com’ into the Domain box – you don’t need to do this for subdomains
- Click ‘Create’
Doing this will clean up your data in Google Analytics, but only from that point forward. You can’t change historic data in your account, but you will record more accurate information without arcot.com getting in the way!
Do you have any questions about Google Analytics? Let us know in the comments. In the meantime, subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss a T-Time video, and get in touch to find out more about our Google Analytics training courses.
