Under GDPR, it is not allowed to collect personal data from your users without their consent. However, if your visitors do provide consent, you are allowed to set tracking cookies.
Before adding a cookie banner:
Your analytics scripts would typically fire on page load, without any delay or restrictions.
After adding a cookie banner:
The tracking scripts are held back from loading until the correct consent has been obtained from your website visitors.
Essentially, no consent means no data.
A bounce rate in analytics can therefore not be avoided after correctly implementing a cookie consent banner on your website.
If you see a sudden change in your analytics data after switching from manual to automatic cookie blocking mode, this is an indication that Cookiebot is working as intended and that your cookies are being blocked more efficiently now than they were previously under your manual implementation.
Your analytics data using the Cookiebot 2-button banner script:
- No data: If the user does not provide consent, neither the visit nor a bounce will be registered in Analytics. So if the user ignores the cookie consent banner and leaves the website without opting either in or out, no data will be registered in Analytics.
- No data: If the user opts out of statistics cookies, the visit as well as any bounce will not be registered in Analytics. Do keep in mind that if a user opts out of statistics cookies, return visits from that user will not be measured either.
- All the data: If the user opts in (=gives consent for statistics cookies), the visit as well as any bounce will be registered in your analytics tool.
Your analytics data using the Cookiebot banner script with Google consent mode:
- Non-identifying data: If the user does not provide consent, your website will still receive aggregate and non-identifying basic measurements data.
- Non-identifying data: If the user opts out of statistics cookies, the visit as well as any bounce will be registered in Analytics.
- All the data: If the user opts in (=gives consent for statistics cookies), the visit as well as any bounce will be registered in Analytics.
Your analytics data after implementing Google consent mode
A sudden change in reporting after implementing consent mode can be due to a previously incorrect handling of the Google Analytics tag. If the tag previously fired regardless of a visitor's consent, then you would have 100% reporting. In such a case, when consent mode is implemented, the tag will by default not be able to set cookies before consent. As a result, reported traffic will be reduced commensurate with the opt-in rate.
If you didn't actively revert back to the "All pages" trigger from the "cookie_consent_statistics" trigger, then the above is almost certainly the cause of the drop in reported data.
With consent mode enabled it's quite normal that sessions won't be logged before consent, since it's not possible to track a visitor across pages without cookies. If Google were to log sessions without using cookies, the number of sessions would be inflated, since every page load would appear to be a new session. For this reason, sessions aren't logged when consent hasn't been given.
When a visitor accepts the use of statistical cookies however, logging should resume as it normally would without using Cookiebot and consent mode.
- Behavioral modeling will cover this gap for Google Analytics 4 properties in the future. Therefore updating to version 4 may also mitigate the loss of data.
- URL Passthrough is another feature that can help recover same-session unconsented hits in reporting.
If you would like to know more about consent mode, and what data you can expect with consent mode enabled, we encourage you to read Google's documentation on the subject:
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1 comment
yes understood all of it soo good and well explained
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