If website users don't accept GDPR cookie consent, does that prevent GA-GTM from tracking pageviews and any traffic from that user that would cause significant traffic decreases?
-
I've been doing a lot research on GDPR impact and implementation with GTM-GA for clients, but it's been 12 months since GDPR has gone live I haven't found anything on how GA traffic has been impacted if users don't accept cookie consent. However, I'm personally seeing GA accounts taking huge losses in traffic since implementing GDPR cookie solutions (because GTM/GA tags aren't firing until cookies are accepted).
Is it common for websites to see significant decreases in traffic due to too many users not accepting cookie consent? Are there alternative solutions to avoid traffic loss like that and still maintain GDPR compliance?
It seems to me that the industry underestimated how many people won't accept cookie consent. Most of the documentation and articles around GDPR's start (May 2018) didn't foresee or cover that aspect properly, everything seems to be technically focused with the assumption that if implemented properly most people would accept cookie consent, but I'm personally not seeing that trend and it's destroying GA data (lost traffic, minimal source attribution, inaccurate behavior data, etc).
Thanks.
-
This is a common and over-zealous implementation of GDPR tracking compliance. Lots of people have lost lots of data, by going slightly overboard in a similar way. Basically you have taken GDPR compliance too far!
GDPR is supposed to protect the user's data, but in terms of - is there a 1 or a 0 in a box in an SQL database for whether an anonymous user visited your site or not (traffic data, not belonging to the user) - it's actually fine to track that (in most instances) without consent. Why? Because the data cannot be used to identify the user, ergo it's your website data and not the user's user data
There used to be a GA hack which Google patched, which forced GA to render IP addresses - but even before it was patched, they banned people (who were using the exploit) from GA for breaking ToS. That kind of data (PII / PID), unless you have specifically set something up through event tracking that records sensitive stuff - just shouldn't even be in Google Analytics at all (and if you do have data like that in your GA, you may be breaking Google's ToS depending upon deployment)
If the data which you will be storing (data controller rules apply) or sending to a 3rd party to store (in which case you are only the data processor and they are the data controller) does not contain PID (personally identifiable data - e.g: email addresses, physical addresses, first and last names, phone numbers etc) - then it's not really covered by GDPR. If you can say that these users have an interest in your business and show that a portion of them transact regularly, you're even less at risk of breaking GDPR compliance
If you're worried about cookie stuff:
"Note: gtag.js and analytics.js do not require setting cookies to transmit data to Google Analytics."
It's possible with some advanced features switched on like re-marketing related stuff, this might change. But by default at least, it seems as if Google themselves are saying that the transmission of data and the deploying of any cookies are not related to each other, and that without cookies the later scripts can send data to GA just fine without cookies
If you are not tracking basic, page-view level data which is not the user's data (which is not PII / PID), then you are over-applying GDPR. The reason there aren't loads of people moaning about this problem, is that it's only a problem for the minority of people who have accidentally over-applied GDPR compliance. As such it's not a problem for others, so there's no outcry
There'**s lots more info here: **https://www.blastam.com/blog/gdpr-need-consent-for-google-analytics-tracking
"This direction is quite clear. If you have enabled Advertising features in Google Analytics, then you need consent from the EU citizen first. Google defines ‘Advertising features’ as:
- Remarketing with Google Analytics.
- Google Display Network Impression Reporting.
- Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting.
- Integrated services that require Google Analytics to collect data for advertising purposes, including the collection of data via advertising cookies and identifiers.
-"
If you aren't using most, many or any of the advanced advertising features, your implementation is likely to be way too aggressive. Even if you are using those advanced features, you only need consent for those elements and specifically where they apply and transmit data. A broad-brush ban on transmitting all GA data is thoroughly overkill
Think about proposing a more granular, more detailed approach. Yes it will likely need some custom dev time to get it right and it could be costly, but the benefit is not throwing away all your future data for absolutely no reason at all
Don't forget that, as the data 'storer' (controller), a lot of the burden is actually on Google's side
**Read more here: **https://privacy.google.com/businesses/compliance/#!?modal_active=none
Hope this helps
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to prevent channel identifiers from showing up in the SERPs?
We append our urls with channel identifiers (?cid) to help us analyze where traffic is coming from. Recently, our appended urls with channel identifiers are showing up in the SERPs. How can we stop this from happening and prevent in the future? Has anyone had similar issues?
Reporting & Analytics | | jmigdal0 -
Measure traffic from serp feature
Hey 🙂 Does anyone know if there's a way of measuring traffic coming through serp features? I know that you can get some info on SEMrush but not traffic coming from those specific results like stories and instant answers. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Anna_90 -
Page Name Tracking - Without UTM links
Hello, Our current site is fully html with no cms. We're moving to a newer version today with a typo 3 cms. My one worry is as follows; On some pages an internal link opens a jquery lightbox, inside the lightbox will be a video or download link. I cannot simply add a standard event url like I wanted to (utm_ link) as the pages are linked via the cms pointing to different pages, not the url's. We really need the following appearing in Analytics, whether its an event or landing page; The click of the light-box link The click of the video OR download link inside the lightbox. I would really, really appreciate any help on this as the new website is going live today, regardless whether this has been resolved. Thank you very much in advance of any replies. twY8s8B.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | Whittie0 -
Traffic drop after analytics troubles
Hi For two weeks we had an artifical low bouncerate & high pageviews/visit in our Analytics reporting. The day we corrected the bug in Analytics - our bouncerate & pageviews/visit returned to normal levels - however we saw our search traffic go down massively(-50% in sessions). The bug in the Analytics was caused by a second Analytics tag which was included in an external script which interfered with our own tag. The drop in traffic occurred just after the removal of the second script (which was only on our site for two weeks). We didn't touch our own tagging - and there were no technical changes on the site during this period, and there is no seasonal trend which could explain the sudden drop of traffic. We double checked our tagging - and the analytics tag is present & working on all the pages of our site. On the organic traffic report from analytics you can clearly see the when the troubles with analytics started & ended (artificial low bounce rate) - and that the traffic drop starts right after the reporting issue ended. Webmastertools also indicated a lower number of views/clicks, but not to the massive 50% drop. Is it possible that Google uses the measurements from Analytics for it's SERP's? Or should there be another reason, and where should we start looking? Appreciate your help! e5GmoMM
Reporting & Analytics | | DirkC0 -
How many users completely block Google Analytics cookies ?
Hello everyone! In your experience, how many of your visitors' browsers completely block cookies including those of Google Analytics ?
Reporting & Analytics | | Masoko-T0 -
Event Tracking Not Working
Hey there. Could use some help in figuring on why the event tracking code on this site http://www.baltimoreareahondadealers.com is not working. There is code on all external domain links but none seem to be firing. Inspect all the map links to view code ie. Search New Honda Inventory What am I missing? Thanks so much. -Caryn
Reporting & Analytics | | Caryn0 -
Impressions up 120%, but traffic not up that much. Why?
Since the penguin update near Oct 6th, both landing page & query impressions are up 120%, but google traffic is actually down 4.89%. CTR is down 45% but we didn't change any of the meta tags on our site. Any ideas why impressions would be up and traffic down? And / or how CTR could decrease without making any edits to the meta data for our pages?
Reporting & Analytics | | nicole.healthline0 -
Google Analytics should track users from iPhone App
Hi Mozzers, you say there are no dumb questions, here is one. We've build an iPhone App for our Website working-dog.eu. So users can read there new messages with ease when they are out of the office, read about breeds, ... do all the nice stuff they want. I don't think so, but is it possible to track these users with Google Analytics? When the come via App, the Analytics code will not run for them. But maybe it could start an AJAX request or something like this? But how should the code run, without a browser which can interprete JavaScript? So, in short: Is it possible to track users from iPhone App with Google Analytics? Kind regards Patrick
Reporting & Analytics | | mdoegel0