If you use Termly (or any other cookie compliance solution) on your website, it can have an impact on metrics such as visits, sessions, bounce rates and events in Google Analytics and other reporting tools.
Impact of Termly on website analytics and traffic reporting
Why does installing a CMP impact analytics and traffic reporting?
With Termly installed, your analytics scripts will not load until the visitor accepts cookies for analytics tools. If the user does not give consent, neither the visit nor a bounce will be registered in your analytics tool.
How much of an impact can installing Termly have?
The impact that installing a CMP will have on the reporting generated by your analytics platform depends on how many of your users opt out of the analytics cookies. The proportion of users that decline consent is a rough estimate of how much the reporting will be impacted.
If most of a website's traffic originates in the EU, where users must be opted out by default when they first land on the page and there needs to be a clear 'decline' option on the banner, then metrics may be impacted as much as 70-80%. However, if most of your traffic is outside of the EU, in regions where regulation is more relaxed, users can be opted in by default, or only shown a consent banner with an 'accept' button. In this case the impact can be much lower, perhaps only 5-10%.
Mitigation strategies to reduce the impact of installing Termly
There are a few things you can do to reduce the impact that installing a CMP has on your ability to maintain high quality website analytics and traffic reporting. To minimize the impact of installing a cookie banner on your analytics metrics:
1. Make use of geo-targeted banner settings
In regions where website users are not required to provide explicit consent, Termly can be configured to be less strict. This will make it more likely that your analytics cookies and scripts will be enabled and data collected. Always ensure to apply these settings in line with local regulations and user rights.
Location based configuration options include:
Disable the consent banner entirely for a specific region
Enable "opt-out" instead of "opt-in" for a specific region
Enable scroll-to-consent (implied consent) for a specific region
Disable the "preferences" or "decline" button for a specific region
To adjust these settings go to your Termly Dashboard > Consent Management > Consent Banner settings > Consent settings.
2. Implement Google's Consent Mode (if using Google Analytics)
Google's "Consent Mode" allows you to adjust how Google Analytics and Ads behave depending on the consent preferences of each individual user, and can be directly integrated with Termly. When integrated, Google's products adjust their behavior, applying advanced data modeling tools instead of collecting data from the user.
Without functional cookies, tools such as Google Tag Manager (GTM) have a measurement gap and lose visibility into user behavior. However, results from Google indicate that their data modeling through Consent Mode recovers more than 70% of ad-click-to-conversions lost due to user cookie consent choices.
Read more: How to use Google Consent Mode with Termly