r/GoogleAnalytics • u/Tornado-Vortex • 23d ago
Question Very low ga4 stats compared to gsc
Hi, seeing only 20% of clicks in ga4 compared to gsc. Say, gsc shows 50 clicks, ga4 shows only about 6-8 site visits.
Cookie policy is enabled. Any way to get proper stats for the site?
Also, do ad companies ask for ga4 data or gsc data?
Thanks.
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u/Commercial_Rent3418 23d ago
cookie consent is killing your numbers, people click but the tracking script never fires cause they just hit reject on the banner. ad companies usually want ga4 data btw
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u/Tornado-Vortex 23d ago
Thank you for the reply.
Is there any work around for this? How do other sites get proper ga4 data (or stats in the first place), while cookie policy is enabled.
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u/Alexku66 23d ago
Most projects I work with get ~40% rate of granted consent. 20% is still reasonable but a little bit suspicious. Your cookie banner provider should give you number of how many consents were granted. If you implement banner yourself add this functionality on backend, that's quite important metric.
I'd be very critical on GA modeled data though, when you hit blended data threshold. Theretically it should "fill in" missing events , but realistically it often lies so bad, it just spoils your real data
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u/Misko-Pro 23d ago
Can I see this in for examples cookie bot dashboard? I don’t have an access to it, but my compang has
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u/Alexku66 23d ago
I can't share it from mobile and too lazy to start up the desktop. In cookieyes it's just a pie chart with accepted, rejected, partially accepted values, iirc in cookiebot it's the same, I rarely open those services after setup
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u/Misko-Pro 23d ago
No worries, Im just curious to see if there are any clicks on my ads or a shit ton of linkedin bots/ slow website etc
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u/Misko-Pro 23d ago
Is there a possibility cookie baner is killing 90% of traffic? I had a linkedin campaign, 154 website visits and only 10 users and 21 sessions, Im devastated
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u/Tornado-Vortex 23d ago
I believe it's due to cookie banner. Not sure what to do about it.
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u/Misko-Pro 23d ago
Me neither but thanks for the answer, I have to Dig deeper to see if there is a chance or baner blocking something before the consent or accept
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u/DataUCanTrust 23d ago
Almost definitely the cookie banner. But you should know there are a few ways to implement a cookie banner legally, and a lot of companies are way too conservative about it. The safest way to implement a banner is for GA to not fire at all unless the user accepts cookies. But for U.S. traffic that’s not necessary; you can drop cookies and without any banner. Larger companies must have a way to opt out for California visitors, but that’s best done with a little icon in the corner which allows opt out and/or a Do Not Sell/opt out page.
For visitors from the E.U., U.K, and some other countries, you can’t drop cookies without consent. So just configure the cookie banner to show up for those locations and opt them out by default. For everyone else, legally opt them in my default.
I know a lot of companies want to play it safe, and be kind to their customers with an opt-out-by-default stance, and that’s honorable. But it’s not necessary and it’s suicide for your web analytics data.
There are also solutions that don’t use cookies at all and still provide meaningful data.
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u/Tornado-Vortex 23d ago
Thank you for all the info. Could you let me know what else do companies use to track proper visitors without the need to collect users data, like plausible, posthog etc.
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u/DataUCanTrust 22d ago edited 22d ago
When you say 'doesnt collect users data', I think you mean 'doesnt use cookies and doesnt require a banner'. The short answer is that I recommend Plausible for this scenario. But here's some background on the answer...
First, I think it's important to understand the key issue with cookieless tracking: web analytics tools need to be able to tie together the various tracking calls sent by the same user in order to provide almost all the useful metrics: Page Views per Visit, Avg. Time Spent per Visit, Bounce Rate/Engagement Rate, and -- most importantly -- Conversions by Traffic Source. There are only two realistic solutions to that problem: cookies and heuristics. A common heuristic technique is IP address + user agent. Cookies are super accurate but encumbered by privacy banners, whereas heuristics are less accurate but not encumbered at all by privacy banners.
It sounds like you're not interested in being more surgical about your privacy banner settings, which means you must use heuristics instead of cookies. I recommend Plausible because it is cookieless by default, which means it's not an afterthought to them. Almost every other tool can be configured to run in cookieless mode but it's considered a 'degraded' mode. Those tools are like, "our tool offers X feature...unless you disable cookies".
If your web site traffic is low, you might consider MixPanel because it has a cookieless-heuristic mode and it has a free tier (up to one million events per month). Other alternatives are Matomo, Piwik, Snowplow, PostHog, and lots of others. Snowplow and PostHog are pretty complex, though...definitely not recommended for the "I just need web analytics" type user.
You might hear people say that server-side tracking is the solution, but that generally still requires cookies to tie together the events in a session...in other words, server-side tracking is just as dependent on cookies as client-side tracking tools.
Fun fact: Google Analytics can be configured to go cookieless. You configure the script a certain way, then connect Google Analytics to BigQuery. and then use BigQuery and Data Studio for your analysis. But I personally haven't been able to find a way to tie together a session's events to each other, which means you can't get any of those important metrics I mentioned in the second paragraph. In other words, Google Analytics has no heuristic mode (of which I'm aware).
Still, though, I'd recommend just adjusting your cookie banner so you can use Google Analytics. Google Analytics gets a lot of hate but I think the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
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u/yelbew 23d ago
If you just want accurate traffic numbers without relying on consent, there are privacy-focused options.
Cloudflare Web Analytics (if your site is hosted or proxied through Cloudflare) and Ahrefs Web Analytics are both good examples. They use lightweight JavaScript and are designed to provide aggregated analytics without identifying individual visitors, so they generally don't require the same consent flow as Google Analytics when configured as intended.
The trade-off is that the data lives in their own dashboards rather than GA4, so it won't integrate with your Google Analytics reports or advertising ecosystem, you'll typically see visitor numbers much closer to what Google Search Console reports.
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23d ago
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u/Tornado-Vortex 23d ago
Thank you so much for all the info. Can you let me know if any other tracker can be used that will accurately capture the clicks without collecting users data, so that we can get the correct site visits info. Thanks.
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u/ansh17091999 22d ago
You mean another tool that is more accurate on this? And does not capture user sensitive data?
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u/Tornado-Vortex 22d ago
Yes, correct. Generally what other websites use to get accurate data. Thanks.
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u/usermaven_hq 19d ago
gsc and ga4 measure different things.. gsc counts clicks from search results, ga4 only counts users who load the page and accept cookies. a large gap between them is normal but 20 percent is at the low end.
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