Why GA4 and Google Ads Tracking Fail: Ignored Consent Banners

Author

Himanshu Sharma
November 12, 2024

💀 ☠ 💥 One of the main reasons your GA4 and Google Ads conversion tracking are highly inaccurate is that users can easily ignore your cookie consent banner. 💀 ☠

If you allow your users to browse your website without engaging with your consent banner first, you encourage them to browse your website anonymously, which can severely limit data collection.

Most users would not interact with your consent banner when given the choice.

I repeat, most users would not interact with your consent banner when given the choice.

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In Google Advanced consent mode, if a user doesn't interact with the consent banner, all consent states are considered denied by default.

Here's a list of the consent states that are generally set to "denied" by default when a user doesn't interact with the consent banner:

analytics_storage - Consent for analytics cookies and identifiers.

ad_storage - Consent for advertising cookies and identifiers.

ad_user_data - Consent for using personal data for advertising purposes.

ad_personalization - Consent for using data for remarketing and personalized advertising.

personalization_storage - Consent for cookies related to personalization features.

Without explicit consent, your Google tag relies on cookieless pings with limited, non-identifying information. You lose most of the analytics and remarketing capabilities.

If your GA4 property does not qualify for modelled data, this situation can become even worse.

Takeaway

Do not let users browse your website without first interacting with your cookie consent banner by accepting or declining consent.

You would lose far more GA4 and Google Ads conversion data if you let users browse your website without accepting or declining consent.

With the ability to browse your website without first interacting with your consent banner, almost all users will deny consent.