Analytics without consent
Run Simple Analytics alongside GA4 to measure website traffic when visitors reject consent. No cookies or visitor identities.
Simple Analytics
No visitor identity
Measure activity without profiles
Simple Analytics records pageviews and events with their context, such as the page, referrer and campaign parameters. It does not build a profile that follows a person across separate visits.
That gives you another dataset to compare with GA4, without relying on Consent Mode behavioral modeling.
Measure traffic, not users
The useful distinction is between counting activity and connecting it to a person.
What you get
- Pageviews and recorded events
- Referrers and UTM campaign parameters
- Page and campaign traffic trends
- Device and country breakdowns
- Calculated session starts
- API access and data exports
What you don't track
- Identified or returning people
- Journeys across separate visits
- User-level retention and cohorts
- Cross-visit conversion attribution
What this approach gives you
- An independent dataset alongside GA4
- Traffic trends without behavioral modeling
- Counts you can inspect in your own reporting tools
A purchase recorded on Friday cannot be attributed to the same person’s ad click on Monday. Simple Analytics does not connect those separate visits.
How a session starts
Observed: a pageview
The page and its navigation context.
Calculated: unique or non-unique
A unique pageview counts as a session start.
This counts starts of visits. It does not count distinct people.
Observed events. Calculated sessions.
An external referrer indicates a new visit. An internal referrer indicates a continuation. Reloads and browser-history navigation can also be classified as non-unique.
There is no 30-minute inactivity timeout. Leaving a tab open for five hours and then following an internal link does not, by itself, start a new Simple Analytics session.
These rules differ from GA4. Two session totals can differ even when both tools record the same pageviews.
How this differs from Consent Mode
With Basic Consent Mode, Google tags remain blocked when consent is denied. With Advanced Consent Mode, tags can send cookieless pings while analytics_storage is denied. Denied consent does not always mean no requests reach Google.
GA4 behavioral modeling can estimate users and sessions for non-consenting traffic when eligibility requirements are met. Simple Analytics calculates its metrics from recorded events rather than estimating the behavior of unidentified users.
Keep GA4 for the user-level analysis it supports. Use Simple Analytics to compare traffic volumes and trends with an independent measurement method.
Google’s Consent Mode documentation · Behavioral modeling requirements
What the implementation collects
The collection method matters more than the label “cookieless.” These are the implementation details your analytics and privacy teams can inspect.
No cookies
No analytics cookies or identifiers in local storage
IP addresses are dropped
IP addresses are not stored or hashed into visitor identifiers
No cross-session tracking
No persistent visitor identity connects separate visits
No fingerprinting
No device or browser characteristics are used to identify visitors
Keep personal data out of custom events, metadata and page paths. See the collection documentation for the recorded fields and configuration options.
“Cookieless” is not a legal exemption
ePrivacy Article 5(3) concerns storing information on, or accessing information from, a visitor’s device. It is not limited to cookies. Whether consent is required depends on the operation and whether an exemption applies.
GDPR is a separate assessment where personal data is processed. Consent is one possible lawful basis, not the only one.
Our legal reasoning examines the information Simple Analytics uses and why. It also acknowledges uncertainty. Share our technical and legal explanation with your privacy team when assessing your implementation. Keep the consent controls required by the rest of your stack.
What would you compare?
Campaign discrepancies
Compare tagged landing-page traffic with GA4. Ad clicks and pageviews are different metrics; the aim is to investigate the discrepancy, not force the totals to match.
A reporting baseline
Compare pageview counts for the same pages and period. A broader traffic count does not establish that consenting visitors represent everyone else.
Traffic down, or measurement changed?
Compare trends around CMP or tagging changes. A second dataset helps investigate a drop; it does not establish the cause on its own.
Match date range, timezone, page coverage and filters. Check tag behavior before interpreting the difference. Simple Analytics cannot guarantee every visit is recorded: blocked requests, implementation problems and collection settings still matter.
Test it on your own website
Start with a free 30-day proof of concept. We’ll agree on the comparison, help you run Simple Analytics alongside GA4, and review the differences together. We can help with proxies and custom domains where needed.
Go deeper
Frequently asked questions
Are Simple Analytics sessions the same as GA4 sessions?
No. Simple Analytics calculates session starts from pageview context without creating a visitor identity. GA4 uses a different session definition. Compare pageviews first, and document the different definitions before interpreting session totals or trends.
What happens during the free 30-day proof of concept?
We agree on the measurement question, help you run Simple Analytics alongside GA4, and review the comparison together. We can help optimize the setup with a proxy or custom domain where appropriate. The aim is to find out whether the additional dataset answers your reporting question, not to promise a particular increase in traffic.