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Google Advanced Consent Mode can corrupt your GA4 BigQuery Export if you don’t deal with cookieless pings.

When you use Google Advanced Consent Mode, the data dfiscrepancy between your GA4 property and GA4 BigQuery export increases considerably, and you start collecting junk data in BigQuery.

When Advanced Consent Mode is implemented, there is a notable difference between what you see in your GA4 reports and what is available in your BigQuery export data tables.

For example, you could see far more conversions and purchase events in BigQuery than in your GA4 property.

This happens because,

By default, the GA4 BigQuery export does not fully honour the Google Advanced Consent Mode and continues to import event data (some but not all) from your GA4 property even if users decline consent.

GA4 BigQuery export includes the cookieless pings collected by GA4 when user consent is not given.

These “cookieless pings” in GA4 from unconsented users contain limited, anonymized event data. They generally include:

  • Event names and details (page views, clicks, etc.).
  • Limited device and browser information.
  • IP-based geolocation (anonymized).
  • Consent status.
  • Events without personal identifiers (such as cookies, device IDs, user IDs, client IDs, advertising IDs, etc).
  • Data related to anonymized sessions (Session start and end, Session metadata etc). But without consistent identifiers, it’s difficult to link events within a session.

All of this data is pretty much useless to analyze.

For example,