How to exclude traffic from Google Analytics

With previous versions of Google Analytics (ga.js) you could simply add a utm_nooverride=1 parameter to a redirect URL to retain the source data from the first referral instead of attributing conversion to the last redirect. If you are trying to exclude online payments / checkout data from Google Analytics: This doesn't work with redirects to banks as this parameter is not passed along, so the issuer will be seen as the referrer.

In the most recent version of Google Analytics library at the time of writing (analytics.js), the utm_nooverride=1 parameter is not a recommended (and perhaps unworkable) solution (as noted in this blog here). The recommended solution in Universal Analytics is to add the domains to the referral exclusions list. From Google's own documentation:

 

The referral exclusion list uses CONTAINS matching. For example, if you enter example.com, then traffic from sales.example.com is also excluded (because the domain name contains example.com).

 

When you are adding domains to your exclusions list, you can add the bank url base domain. By adding the base domain, you can exclude subdomains of redirect referral URLs (and 3DS redirect URLs for payments). Please note, this solution does require some upfront manual work, but will exclude these redirects as referrals in the future.

There also seems to be some advanced workarounds using cross-domain tracking, which you can find in Google's own documentation. 

Why did my expired credit card get processed?

An expired credit card is not necessarily an invalid credit card. It's ultimately your credit card issuer's decision if they want to accept your transaction. While the merchant who processed your transaction almost certainly sent along your CVC code and expiry date in the payment request, sometimes the credit card issuers and/or acquirers do not even look at or process that information. If there is enough information to go off of to for the issuer to believe that this is a valid transaction, they still may decide to process your transaction regardless of your card being expired or the CVC being incorrect.

Most major credit card issuers and acquirers now also offer merchants software that automatically updates subscription customer card data as well. On top of that, expiration dates are not considered sensitive information. Under certain use cases, it's fine for merchants to retry your transaction with a new expiration date - it's pretty easy to guess and build logic around what your new expiration date probably is.

This also means that merchants should never decline a card at checkout just because it looks to be expired. In my experience, there is no change in authorization rates between expired cards and cards that have not expired yet. 

If you are a consumer, always destroy old expired cards when you receive a new one. And do not assume your account has closed just because your credit card has expired.