Do you need a cookie banner for Google Analytics?

Google Analytics 4 sets cookies on a visitor’s device. The main ones are _ga and _gid, used to recognise a visitor across page loads and sessions. Under the EU’s ePrivacy Directive, a website needs consent before it can set cookies or access a visitor’s device, with a narrow set of exceptions that analytics does not qualify for. The GDPR then governs what happens to the personal data those cookies create.

In practice, that means every site in the EU and UK that runs Google Analytics must show a cookie banner and get valid opt-in before the GA script loads. Running the script before consent is given is itself the breach, even if visitors later consent.

A cookie banner is a conversion tax. Every visitor who clicks "reject all" is excluded from your analytics, and every visitor who clicks "accept" had to dismiss a pop-up before they could read your page. In EU markets, a significant share of visitors reject, which means a significant share of your real traffic never makes it into your reports.

This is the "consent data gap": the difference between your actual traffic and what a cookie-based tool reports. It is the reason many teams end up running a privacy-friendly tool alongside GA, to see the traffic GA loses.

A cookieless analytics tool takes a different path: it sets no cookies and stores no personal data on the visitor’s device. Because no cookies are set and no device access happens, the ePrivacy consent requirement does not apply. You embed one script tag and you are done. No banner, no consent management platform, no "accept all" pop-up between your visitor and your content.

Visitor identification is done with a short-lived, salted hash of non-personal signals (IP, user agent, domain) that resets daily, so the same person cannot be followed over time. The raw IP is discarded. What remains is the aggregate data you actually need: how many people visited, where they came from, what they looked at.

If you run Google Analytics in the EU or UK, yes, you need a cookie banner and valid consent before the script loads. If you switch to a cookieless analytics tool that sets no cookies and stores no personal data, you do not. That is the whole appeal: compliance by architecture, not by configuration you have to maintain on every page.

MetriXs is a cookieless, EU-hosted analytics tool with a free plan. It sets no cookies, stores no IP addresses, and needs no consent banner. See how it works or compare it with Google Analytics.