Why does everything “kind of work” until money enters the room?
I’ve seen this more than once. Paid traffic is live, the CRM is filling up, sales are happening. But GA4 looks oddly pessimistic: fewer sessions, fewer conversions, and attribution suddenly obsessed with “(direct)”.
On paper, the setup is clean. Until the first budget discussion starts.
What’s quietly distorting the picture?
Consent Mode doesn’t just limit tracking - it reshapes the dataset. Part of the journey becomes:
• missing
• modeled
• shifted toward users who gave consent
You end up optimizing spend based on a report that reflects consent behavior, not actual demand.
What’s easy to miss here?
GA4 UI doesn’t tell you which numbers are real and which are reconstructed. Without deep investigation, every KPI is conditional — even if it looks stable.
How I usually deal with this?
I build a simple view with tiny behavioral signals adjusted by Consent Mode. Then I fix expectations: CPA and ROAS adjusted by a visible data-loss factor — before someone cuts a channel that’s just undercounted.
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