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There are new bots every day. And there are agent bots that are grabbing stuff from your site as people are asking about it in your agent sometimes.
Unless they are known bad bots (and even then, I’m not sure Google makes that choice at all – you have to decide if they are good or bad and tell it what to do) or known crawlers it’s going to count them because, for all intents and purposes, it might very well be an agent on a task for a user who might be a customer.
Also – I agree with your GDPR philosophy in principle, maybe – it does make things a pain in the butt. But it’s required. And for the EU GDPR is an opt in thing – as are California, New York, and a growing number of sites. You don’t need permission (in most cases) for first party data so long as you never plan on sharing it. But as soon as you introduce Google or some other party to the system – the game changes. Now people have to opt-in or Analytics isn’t going to count them (unless it’s not a human).
So yeah – if you are using analytics and you’ve got traffic in places where this matters, since you are never asking them to opt in, they aren’t going to be tracked.
Well, that’s a bit overly simplified, but you get the idea. 99% of the traffic is likely to be bots if you’ve not asked for and gotten people to opt in. In fact, it really should be a number that’s exactly 100%, It looks like it might be over tracking a bit.
Anyway – any test I’ve seen over the years as to whether Analytics helps or not has resulted in either a “No” or a “No with a caveat” – and that caveat is that if you use Analytics, you might also be more inclined to be using that tracking data to improve SEO and therefore a site with it is more likely to rank better because the marketing team has data. Now with 1st Party Data being more common – I would suspect that any testing now would result in “No” and forget the caveat. In fact, the best optimized sites might be indicated by the ones that are larger brands (who should have a search budget) but do not use GA4 because first party data isn’t necessarily anonymized unless you’re planning on sharing or selling it.
G.
