Is Google Analytics still telling you how many people visit your website?

There was a time when analytics scripts counted most visitors reliably. Website owners could look at a chart and feel confident it matched their real traffic. There were fewer technical or legal barriers: almost every browser loaded JavaScript trackers, and few people used ad blockers. But as privacy protections have evolved, traditional analytics now face multiple blind spots. Modern browsers (like Safari and Firefox) limit third-party cookies and tracking scripts by default. Tools like uBlock Origin and network-level trackers mean many visits are never recorded at all. Meanwhile, GDPR and similar laws require websites to obtain consent before tracking, shrinking the visible audience further. What was once a near-complete count has become, for many, an incomplete sample.

Cookie banners, ad blockers, and browser privacy features mean GA4 is often working with only a portion of your visitors. For example, if your site correctly asks for consent before using Google Analytics, anyone who declines is excluded from your stats. Google’s Consent Mode tries to fill in gaps by modelling behaviour statistically. But this means that the numbers you see may be a mix of actual measurements and estimates. That is not a failure or an error - it is a reflection of changing technical and legal realities. Even Google acknowledges (source) that blocking technologies and consent requirements can affect GA4’s count.

• Ad blockers and privacy browsers can prevent scripts firing
• Some large employers and public networks block Google Analytics entirely
• Scripts can break if a tag is misconfigured

For smaller websites, even a few dozen missed visits can change your conversion rate or the apparent success of a campaign.

Google Analytics 4 often combines two types of information: direct measurements (people who allow tracking) and modelled data (statistical estimates where consent is missing or scripts are blocked). This mix is necessary for privacy, but it means that the headline numbers are no longer a faithful mirror of every real visitor. For sophisticated marketing campaigns, modelling can be valuable. But if the questions you are asking are simple - “Did people read this article?” or “Did our event page see more visitors?” - complex modelling may confuse more than it clarifies.

Pro tip: When reporting or comparing traffic over time, always ask whether any changes to consent banners, analytics scripts or privacy settings occurred between periods. Even small tweaks can have a large impact on observed traffic.

GDPR requires consent for non-essential cookies, including most analytics tools. If your site uses a cookie banner to collect consent, here’s what usually happens: some people agree, some decline, and others ignore the banner altogether. Anyone who does not consent is invisible to Google Analytics - their visit is absent from your stats. On top of that, ad blockers and script-blocking browsers reduce the visible audience even further. According to studies by Plausible, 10-25% of visitors may not be tracked at all, depending on your audience. That missing data is both a win for privacy and a headache for meaningful analytics.

First-party analytics aim to bring website measurement back inside your own platform. Instead of sending visitor data to a third party like Google, analytics run within your CMS or server and store aggregate data under your direct control. For example, a WordPress or Craft CMS plugin can:

• Log page views and sessions without relying on external scripts
• Skip storing IP addresses or personal identifiers
• Show simple, unambiguous stats about content and traffic

This approach means fewer dependencies, less data risk, and results that are easier to explain to colleagues or stakeholders. It will not be right for every organisation - if you are running complex multi-channel marketing campaigns, you may still need something like GA4. But for many small teams who need to answer “Is my website being used and what is popular?”, a first-party option is refreshingly simple.

No analytics platform has a universally correct definition of a "visitor." Take Craft Analytics as an example: it deliberately rotates its anonymous visitor-identification salt every 24 hours. This means the same person visiting multiple days will count as a new daily unique visitor each day. The metric is clear about its limitations and designed to avoid building long-term profiles of individuals. In contrast, GA4 attempts to connect sessions into persistent user identities using cookies or device IDs. Both approaches have pros and cons - the crucial thing is to understand what your chosen analytics tool measures, and why.

Generic analytics tools see everything as a URL, but first-party, CMS-integrated analytics can do more. For example, Craft Analytics can report on traffic by section, entry type, or author - giving you insight into which content areas or team members are most engaging. Inside WordPress, Honest Analytics gives you a snapshot of exactly which pages and posts are actually attracting real visits, without needing to translate numbers between platforms. This integration means the analytics reflect how you actually run your site, not just how browsers behave.