Cookie consent and GA4 modelling - Google Analytics Tutorial

- When GA4 was first announced, one of the features that Google was very excited about was this idea of behavioral and conversion modeling for consent mode. Now, what does that mean? First off, let's talk about what consent mode means. You're probably thinking of those little, "Are you okay with cookies notifications?" that you see come up on websites when you first visit them. Those are actually consent mode. Those are sent via what's called a consent management platform, a CMP, and those platforms collect what the user says when it comes to cookies, and then they communicate that to the various analytics tools like GA4, Google Ads, and so on, so that only the things you have consented to are actually captured. The consent mode part of GA4 comes in when GA4 is told what the visitor consented to or didn't consent to by the CMP. There are five different possibilities for GA4 specifically when it comes to consent. Granted for both ads storage and analytics storage, granted for ads storage and denied for analytics storage, denied for ads storage and granted for analytics storage, denied for both ads storage and analytics storage, or no consent signals were received. Why do ads come into it? That's because GA4 integrates so closely with Google Ads, and so there are specific things that are stored in GA4 when it comes to advertising. Now, what happens with each option? If ads storage and analytics storage are both granted, nothing will change from what you see in GA4 right now. If ads storage is denied in any of the options, no new advertising cookies can be set and no existing ad cookies can be read either. So if you originally said yes to ads cookies and then changed your mind, then those older cookies can no longer be accessed. If analytics storage is denied in any of the options, then GA4 can't set any cookies, which means you can't actually track what you do from page to page on the website. This is what is called cookieless data. Every time you go to a new page or even reload the current page, you're going to look like a brand new person as far as analytics is concerned. Data does still go off to GA4, but since there isn't a cookie to help GA4 understand that these events are collected by the same person or even during the same event, they end up divorced from each other. How can you tell if you're collecting cookieless data? We'll use Omnibug to find out. We covered using this tool in our last lesson, How Does GA4 Capture Information? So please watch that to see how to install this extension. Now, I want a website that has consent mode set up properly, and in the GA4 events, I'm looking at a Page View event here, and in the other section, I'm looking for this GCS parameter. And here it is and it's set to G111. This GCS value tells GA4 what consent options were selected by the user. The options are: granted for both ads storage and analytics storage, that's G111. Granted for ads storage and denied for analytics storage, that's G110. Denied for ads storage and granted for analytics storage, that's G101. Denied for both ads storage and analytics storage, that's G100. And if no consent signals are received, that shows up as G1xx or you just won't see the GCS option show up at all. Since I'm seeing G111 here, that means that I granted consent to everything. If I hadn't granted consent to everything and I did see G111, that means there's a disconnect between my consent management platform and what GA4 is receiving. So if you're seeing that. you need to talk to whomever set up your consent management platform for you. If you are collecting GA4 cookieless data, you would have the values of G110 or G100. That means that you would have access to modeling in GA4. If it's available to you, you would see that option turned on here in the reporting identity settings in the admin of GA4. But the conditions to get this modeling to work are steep. You must meet the criteria of having at least 1,000 events per day where users allow analytics storage in seven of the previous 28 days and 1,000 events per day where users deny analytics storage for at least seven days. Now, you should have a clear understanding of how GA4 works with cookie consent and what that can mean for your GA4 data.