The playbook that recovered 18% of "direct" traffic

The playbook that recovered 18% of "direct" traffic

A subscription box brand swore their paid social didn't work. Last-click said direct owned 41% of signups. The real story was a self-referral leak from their payment gateway redirect.

The fix was a four-step audit anyone can run in GA4:
— Open Reports, Acquisition, Traffic acquisition, set dimension to Session source/medium
— Scan for your own checkout domain, gateway, or staging subdomain in the list
— Add every offender to Admin, Data Settings, Unwanted Referrals
— Wait 48 hours, then re-pull the same report and compare

Within two weeks, "direct" dropped from 41% to 23%. The recovered 18% reattributed cleanly to paid social and email, which had been quietly carrying the funnel all along.

The stripe redirect was eating credit on every transaction.

Lesson: before you cut a channel for "not converting," check whether your own redirects are stealing its attribution.