Not using referral exclusions in Universal Analytics

Question

I have the following website setup:

One property called example.com.

On this property, I track multiple domains and subdomains, such as:

• www.example.dk
• subdomain.example.dk
• www.example.se
• www.example.de
• www.example.es
• ...

I am currently using old Analytics (not universal) but have started the process for migration. Have not yet updated the tracking code.

What will happen if I don't add the domains to the Referral Exclusion List? Will then every pageview, let's say on www.example.dk, be treated as a session, because it's coming from a referral (www.example.dk) not on the list of excluded referrals?

The reason I don't want to add the domains to the Referral Exclusion list is because I want to still be able to track cross-domain referrals (like from www.example.dk to www.example.de for example), and also managing the list manually with each new domain is something I want to avoid.

Answer 1

This is from: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2795830?hl=en. In particular, to answer your question, I've bolded a specific sentence.

How excluding referral traffic affects your data

By default, a referral automatically triggers a new session. When you exclude a referral source, traffic that arrives to your site from the excluded domain doesn’t trigger a new session. If you want traffic arriving from a specific site to trigger a new session, don't include that domain in this table.

Because each referral triggers a new session, excluding referrals (or not excluding referrals) affects how sessions are calculated in your account. The same interaction can be counted as either one or two sessions, based on how you treat referrals. For example, a user on my-site.com goes to your-site.com, and then returns to my-site.com. If you do not exclude your-site.com as a referring domain, two sessions are counted, one for each arrival at my-site.com. If, however, you exclude referrals from your-site.com, the second arrival to my-site.com does not trigger a new session, and only one session is counted.