How does behavioral modeling work for users who decline the use of cookies?
In the case of using Advanced Consent Mode v2 and when the user has the analytics_storage flag set to denied, so-called "cookieless pings" are sent, bypassing the use of cookie files, and the user's behavior is modeled.
What does this mean?
Even if the user declines the use of cookie files, you can still get an approximate estimate for the following questions:
How many Users do I have?
How many sessions do I have?
How many new users did I acquire from my last campaign?
However, behavioral modeling for Consent Mode in GA4 comes with several limitations. For example:
1. The property should collect at least 1,000 events per day with analytics_storage='denied' for at least 7 days.
2. The property should have at least 1,000 daily users sending events with analytics_storage='granted' for at least 7 of the previous 28 days.
3. It may take more than 7 days of meeting the data threshold within those 28 days to train the model successfully.
4. Modeling is not applied to event counts such as page_view, first_visit, and session_start.
5. Several features are not supported in behavioral modeling, including Audiences, User explorer, Segments with a sequence, Retention reports, and others.
One crucial thing to consider – if you don't have substantial traffic and meeting the requirements for behavioral modeling takes some time, you might experience a noticeable drop in traffic on your website. More details on this are covered by Michele Pisani.
If you work with GA4 to BigQuery exports, be sure to check out my SQL cheat sheet.
