GTM + GA4 init after consent - Data loss?

Question

Question about something I am not sure about. But the way I set everything up for my ecommerce site is:

1. When people will visit the page they will get a Cookie Consent Bar which you can accept or will auto accept after 10% scroll.

2. GTM will only init after accepting and this will also trigger the GA4 tag and everything else (like Conversion linkers etc etc)

So when people visiting my site for the first time through lets say an ad campaign, they will load the page without GTM/Ga4 running.

Will this be a problem for tracking traffic sources and CPC performance? I can imagine that if someone comes from my CPC campaign, but there isn't any analytics code yet, that the data and traffic source will get lost?

Answer 1

Yes, if they come from cpc, don't do the 10% scroll and close the page, the hit is lost.

However, if you issue a pageview after the consent is given to compensate for the one that hasn't been issued, then the attribution shouldn't be a problem since you still have all the PPC query params in your string and the referrer set to whatever it should be.

I'm not sure how legal it is to imply consent after 10% scroll. It makes logical sense, but the privacy crowd would likely be heavily offended by such an implication.