If you have recently set up the Usercentrics cookie consent solution on your website, you may have experienced an uptick in the percentage of unassigned traffic in your Google Analytics account.
This could be a concern, especially for marketers who would like to obtain insights into how visitors are using the website.
This article will help provide information as well as actionable steps to help address this issue.
Before we move forward, it is important to understand that privacy rights often directly conflict with tools that are trying to collect website visitor data. For example, some privacy laws prohibit Google Analytics from collecting personal information until that individual has consented to their data being collected and shared. Additionally, the recent changes in privacy laws and regulations have created a lot of complexities and unknowns in the web industry at this current time. As time goes on, there will likely be easier to implement features as well as more efficient troubleshooting that Google (and other companies) provide so that you can receive maximum analytics reporting, while still respecting the privacy rights of your website visitors.
Between now and then, we hope that this article helps you troubleshoot this issue.
Assumptions prior to moving forward
This article is for website owners who:
Are using Google Tag Manager to load the Google Analytics 4 script.
Have set up Consent Mode V2 compatibility (Google’s latest requirement) via this step-by-step guide (if you have not set up consent mode via these instructions, you can still proceed reading the rest of this article, if you are wanting to implement the Advanced version to start).
Setting up Consent Mode V2 is a requirement for virtually all website owners using Google related products these days. Google requires this to ensure their tools (like Google Tag Manager) receive the right communications so that they know what scripts/tags are allowed to load based on user consent.
It’s possible that after setting up Consent Mode V2, you immediately see an improvement in reported Assigned traffic. If you are not, continue reading this article.
Please note, the step-by-step guide we provide is for setting up Basic Consent Mode (not Advanced, which collects user data without consent. This is discussed in more detail below if you want to consider switching over to Advanced consent mode).
If you are instead loading Google Analytics 4 directly into the <head> of your website (and you have “Google Analytics 4” properly listed as a Service on the final page of the Cookie Policy and Consent Tool questionnaire), and you are seeing this issue, the only known ‘fix’ at this time is to choose “Device based” Reporting Identity (see these steps). This is a privacy friendly approach to fixing the unassigned traffic issue, however there are limitations to Device based reporting that you should be aware of.
Why is the percentage of unassigned traffic increasing after installing the cookie consent banner?
Cookie consents block features like Google Analytics from loading until after a user gives consent in order to comply with applicable legislation. This will inherently have an impact on reported website traffic, as users are opted out by default, and they must take an explicit action (for example clicking ‘accept all’) to be tracked and have their data collected and shared with third parties.
Collecting (and sharing) user data without their consent can not only result in non-compliance fines, but even lawsuits. It’s important to find a balance here between respecting the privacy rights of website visitors, while also receiving relevant data for your business.
Options to consider:
The following items outline the ways in which you can help lower the percentage of unassigned traffic.
Reminder: Google takes up to 72 hours to finalize its reporting. So, after making a change, you will need to wait several days to see if those changes helped.
Option #1 - Optimize the consent banner to encourage interaction -
Within the Cookie Policy and Consent Tool questionnaire, you can make the following updates:
For layout, choose ‘wall’. This puts the consent tool right in front of the user, encouraging them to interact with it.
Remove the ‘x’ or ‘close without accepting’ option. This encourages users to click the buttons, whether it be “accept all” or “deny”.
Click ‘submit’ for changes to take effect. Test your changes in a fresh incognito window.
Option #2 - Switch to a device based Reporting Identity within Google Analytics.
Whether you are loading GA4 directly in the <head> of your website, or through Google Tag Manager, these steps outline how you can switch to a Device Based Reporting Identity within Google Analytics. This is a privacy friendly approach to fixing the unassigned traffic issue, however there are limitations to Device based reporting that you should be aware of.
Option #3 - Switch from Basic to Advanced Consent Mode V2
Google’s Advanced option for Consent Mode V2 involves sending Google “cookieless pings”, giving Google more insights as well as the ability to provide more advanced data modeling, helping ‘fill in the gaps’ for data lost due to lack of user consent.
Privacy concerns - advanced consent mode involves Google collecting user IP addresses without proper consent. For this reason, we can not recommend this option from a privacy compliance perspective as it may cause violations, but we understand that this may be required to fulfill requests from website clients and/or marketing departments.
Other items worth considering:
Please wait up to 72 hours before reviewing your Google Analytics data after you make any of the above changes, as Google requires this amount of time to fully update their dashboards.
If the above suggestions did not help, please note the following:
Ensure UTM parameters are properly set (see this guide).
Look at this Google answers page, specifically the section around "Channels for manual traffic." Then you can compare GA4s channel assignment rules against your UTMs and see if that's the issue.
Known bug within Google - at the time of writing this article (June 2024), several blogs and comments online suggest that Google is aware of bug(s) impacting reported traffic which could explain why some of its users are seeing less assigned traffic than normal.
Options to avoid:
You may be tempted to go the ‘easy route’ and make changes to your cookie consent that could result in non-compliance. Be sure to avoid doing the following. If you are implementing this feature for a client and they are requesting the following, ensure you have documentation that you told them that you are not responsible for any consequences when making any of the following changes:
Marketing Google Analytics 4 as Essential or ‘accepted by default’ - changing the category of the Google Analytics 4 Service from Marketing to Essential (or changing the Consent Status to ‘Accepted by default’) means that Google Analytics 4 will load regardless of user consent choices. This is a non-compliant practice from a privacy perspective and should be avoided.
Removing cookie consent from the website entirely (or switching to a non-compliant, non-Google certified CMP tool) - Removing the consent tool (or using a non-compliant cookie consent or using a non-Google certified cookie consent) is another practice that may be tempting but should also be avoided. Failure to capture proper consent is what can result in website related fines or even lawsuits.
Did this help? Does your issue still exist?:
Consent mode is new for everyone. If you found success after going through this article, or if you are still having challenges, please reach out to us and let us know, as we want to help other customers as well and your insights are here are very valuable to us!