Why do you see a drop in SEO after adding a cookie management tool for Law 25 / GDPR?

Tuesday, November 7, 2023

With the most recent entry into force of the provisions of Law 25 towards the end of September 2022, you have probably noticed a drop (which can often be quite large) in your site statistics. In this article, we'll cover what's causing this drop and what you can do about it.

The impact of cookie management on Google Analytics statistics

According to what we have noticed, installing a cookie management tool has a direct impact on website statistics. For our part, we noticed drops of around 40% in statistics on average (but we knew that certain sites saw drops of up to 80% in visits from SEO), which is still a major impact.

After investigating the causes of this drop, one of the most popular cookie management tools (CookieYes) told us this:

Just so you know, when a banner is added to your site, the website will activate analytics tracking only when users accept the cookies associated with the third-party analytics service. The significant decrease in the count could be attributed to two reasons: either the user rejects the category or never clicks on the banner.
 
If you prefer to run analytics without the user's explicit consent, you may move the analytics cookies to the necessary category. Or, you can enable the Analytics category in the "load cookies prior to consent" setting. However, we suggest that you ensure these actions comply with the legal requirements in your specific region.

Basically, if you see a drop, your cookie management tool is working! As the law indicates, the tool blocks cookies until they are assigned (so Google does not receive the information until it is accepted). So if a person does a search in Google and arrives on your site, if on the site he clicks on the "Refuse" button (or if he does not click on anything at all), the cookie is never created, therefore Google Analytics is not able to capture its information.

According to our research, it is also possible that a drop in your visits from SEO decreases, but at the same time, Direct origin increases. This case is due to the order in which certain scripts are executed, which means that a visit from Google could be counted as a direct visit.

How to fix the problem of falling statistics in Google Analytics?

According to what the specialist informed us, it would be possible to resolve the problem by modifying the configuration of the cookie management tool so that the Analytics cookies are moved to the essential cookies section. On the other hand, according to what we understand of the law (and the specialist warned us to ensure that if we transfer Google's cookies to the essential section that this does not break any rules), making this change would no longer respect the Law 25 which should allow the user to choose how their data is processed.

Taking into account the restrictions of Law 25, although physically it would be possible to resolve the problem, legally, there is unfortunately nothing to do.

In conclusion, since September 22, 2023, we will have to keep in mind that from now on, the statistics that we see in Google Analytics are no longer absolute figures, but that they now only represent a tool that allows us to see the general trends in site performance.