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Glossary

GA4 (Google Analytics 4)

Google's current analytics product. Triggers consent obligations because it sets a client identifier and tracks behaviour across sessions.

Google Analytics 4 — the successor to Universal Analytics, mandatory since UA was deprecated in July 2023.

GA4 sets:

  • _ga — client identifier (90-day persistence by default).
  • _ga_<container> — session state per property.

Both are non-essential under EU law — they're analytics, not service-providing — so consent is required for EU visitors.

GA4 supports Google Consent Mode v2 natively. With GCM v2 set to denied, GA4 still loads but sends "cookieless pings" — anonymised pings used for Google's modeling layer to estimate ("model") missing conversions. This is why blocking GA4 entirely costs more conversions than just running GCM v2 in denied mode.

For Shopify merchants the simple pattern:

  1. Default-deny GCM v2 before any tag fires.
  2. Keep GA4 in the page; it'll send modeled-conversion pings even when consent is denied.
  3. Update GCM on consent.

See also: Consent Mode v2, Modeled conversions.

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