GA4 User Data Collection Acknowledgement
While auditing a GA4 account recently and noticed the traffic from “Google / Organic” was 30% of that reported from Google Search Console.
This was clue that something was not quite right with:
their GA4 set-up
or Consent Mode
or that the Cookie Banner functionality or UX was deterring Users
or most Users blocked cookies in browser or used Brave or something else
or there was not enough traffic to enable behavioural modelling (which it looked like there was)
… or nothing was wrong with GA4 and 70% of all Users were opting out & Consent Mode V1 was deployed
How do you know how accurate GA4 is, if the main source of truth is GA4?
Look at Google Search Console (GSC) as this is Google’s own data on how many clicks your website received from google.com
(*BOOM* went my brain!)
(or perhaps) Look at the stats from the CMP (which may be limited depending on the platform and the subscription)
Compare Meta Ad traffic landing page clicks to sessions (never has been reliable or useful)
Compare Google Ads clicks to sessions (I did not have access to PPC)
After checking the GTM container set-up there were definitely issues with how the triggers and consent mode was configured in conjunction with the CMP (cookie management platform) so I had to audit and explain this.
User Data Collection Acknowledgment (Acknowledged)
But in the meantime we also toggled a setting in GA4, yes that’s right, we accepted/acknowledged the “User Data Collection Acknowledgment” statement hiding at the bottom of the Admin > Data Collection page in the Property Settings.
And as mentioned in the google documentation, 7 days later this happened….
Total Traffic Increased by 160%
But this did not happen evenly across all Channels:
Paid Social increased by a factor of 10!
it was basically hardly tracking any Meta traffic at all and some of it was being assigned to organic social
the pixel was also not tracking anything either (for other reasons)
Organic Traffic doubled (not bad for just pressing a button)
Paid Search tripled
Referral and Direct doubled
So it’s definitely worth making sure the basics in GA4 are ticked off the list!
(possible) Implications…
So it was not obvious to me from the documentation what this setting does or means and tbh it’s still not totally transparent.
What I have learned however is that Consent Mode V2 + Data Acknowledgement is key to unlocking almost all user traffic to GA4 regardless of consent.
The “modelling date Vs observed data” does not so much look like any modelling is actually happening but rather it all becomes Observed under the guise of being “modelled”!
Which is interesting!
