by Jed C Jones, Founder, Ambient Array
Here is another installment in an ongoing series of stories, personal anecdotes, and real business cases shared by our founder, Jed Jones, PhD.
I recently received an analytics assignment from a fellow agency partner for one of their clients in the tech space. The client’s parent company is an international high-tech instruments firm operating on three continents. The end client represents the metrology division (think: measuring very, very small things very, very accurately for science and manufacturing applications).
My analytics mission: find meaningful patterns in how their website users behave on the website and make sure their analytics configuration is optimized for performance.
As a data nerd, I’ll readily admit that embarking on an analytics mission can feel like I’m Indiana Jones being dropped out of a propeller plane for a treasure hunt in an uncharted jungle. With such an assignment, I feel a sense of mission, goal-oriented drive and an explorer’s spirit. (And, unlike THAT Dr. Jones, I don’t have to worry about encountering snakes or spiders).
The Dashboard Looked Fine. The Data Wasn’t There
With data archaeology toolbox in hand, I started by inspecting the client’s Google Tag Manager account. I was surprised to find 177 custom events across all of their web properties. This find immediately told me three things:
a. The company was crazy about event tracking
b. They seemed to have a strong handle on which user actions they considered meaningful
c. I could expect to find a treasure trove of useful event data in their linked Google Analytics’ event reports
I was ready for a good data exploration.
So, I ran a few custom event reports in Google Analytics. And I was stunned at what I saw: there were only a tiny number of events being recorded, relative to the site session counts being registered. In other words: a whole lot of site traffic, but very few events.
Of course, the first thought was: the event tags were either broken or never set up properly in the first place. But here’s the thing: the tags WERE firing. Just very, very seldomly.
What was going on?
How a Consent Banner Silently Switches Off Your Tracking
I dove into the analytics reports, following this workflow:
- Exported GA4 event data over a 12-month date range, using a free-form exploration filtered to the metrology pages
- Exported the published Google Tag Manager (GTM) container as JSON and mapped every tag, trigger and consent group
- Inspected four product pages in browser DevTools and read the data-gtm attribute on every CTA. This produced a matrix of CTA, attribute, trigger, tag and consent for each one.
- Calculated consent rates from GA4 session counts for the banner’s own events (Accept, Reject, Close).
After some analysis of the outputs of these steps, I found my answer: the site’s consent banner was quietly killing the tracking of 98.4% of site traffic.
Specifically: when visitors arrived at the website, only 1.6% of them (4,446 out of 283,372) of them actually “Accepted” tracking cookies.
The effect: only a tiny minority of visitors were visible to Google Analytics. Google Analytics just quietly ignored the rest. That means that calls to action, form submissions and downloads data reflected less than 2% of real visitor behavior. That’s a tiny trickle of what could potentially be a data river.
Was site tracking broken, after all? No, not at all. It was doing its job, which includes following the rules of purposefully NOT tracking folks who hadn’t clicked “Accept” in the consent banner. Almost nobody was eligible to be tracked. People were self-selecting out of the tracking journey.
Other Small Breaks That Piled Up: Renamed Buttons, Missing Tags, Dead Code
Meanwhile, a further analysis unearthed many more broken, redundant or failing assets in the client’s analytics configuration. For example:
- Renamed buttons: two hero button tags looked for a button label that had been renamed during a site redesign. They had been reporting zero, with no error, ever since.
- Poor call to action (CTA) coverage: only 5 of 11 CTA types on the sampled product pages were tracked. 4 types (phone numbers, “Explore,” “Stay Updated,” “View All”) had no attribute the tag manager could detect. 2 types had the attribute but no trigger.
- Dead code: 74 legacy Universal Analytics tags were still in the container, even though UA stopped processing data in July 2023. 9 of them had no GA4 replacement, including click-to-call and click-to-email. Forms: the general inquiry form was tracked only in the dead UA system. GA4 tracked newsletter sign-ups only.
- 60 orphaned triggers in Google Tag Manager (meaning: they were not assigned to any particular event tags)
- Duplicate download events for the same action were detected
- A case collision between click and Click that was causing event reporting redundancy for some events
Consent Mode v2: Recovering Data Without Compromising Privacy
Once identified, I fixed each of the broken items one by one within the Google Tag Manager setup. The fixes were straightforward.
But what to do about the over 98% of hidden traffic issue?
The answer for this client was implementing Google’s Consent Mode v2. This Google Analytics 4 (GA4) feature leverages a behavioral modeling process called the published range. Its function is to estimate missing traffic and conversions based on anonymous, cookie-less pings to users’ devices. (This anonymous data contains signals like device type, country and whether a conversion happens).
The next effect: the website stays GDPR compliant and it works at the configuration level, so no individual tags need to change.
Bringing it Full Circle
I was able to present my agency partner with a 20-page report explaining what I found and how I fixed it. The best part: they were able to keep their GDPR-compliant consent banner firmly in place and doing its job. But we were still able to gain insights into about 70% of their site traffic, up from under 2%. That, combined with the fixed triggers and tags and the removal of legacy code, meant that the client could move forward with a clean analytics bill of health and a clear path into a future of making excellent website decisions.
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