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consent mode v2 has been required for EEA traffic since March 2024. if your site runs Google tags and serves European visitors, consent mode is either active and affecting your data or not active and causing compliance issues.

either way, your conversion counts are not what they appear to be.

here is what consent mode v2 does: when a user declines cookies, Google fires cookieless pings instead of full tracking calls. these pings feed a modeled conversion, not an observed one. GA4 and Google Ads fill in the gap using machine learning.

for accounts with significant EU traffic, this means a portion of your "conversions" are modeled estimates, not real events. they are labeled as such in GA4 if you know where to look, but they aggregate into your main conversion totals without a flag.

three things to check:

1. in Google Tag Manager, do you have consent mode v2 implemented? (not just a cookie banner, but an actual consent mode API integration)

2. in GA4, go to Admin, then Data Collection, then Consent settings. is consent mode active?

3. in your conversion data, is the gap between observed and modeled conversions growing? if EU traffic is increasing, modeled conversions should also increase.

this is not a problem to panic about. it is a variable to understand when interpreting your data.

/conversion-audit covers consent mode gap detection as part of the standard run: https://paidmedialab.com/pack

saku