GA4 requires 1,000+ denied-consent events daily for behavioral modeling to activate. A store with 500 daily visitors at 50% consent rate generates only 250 denied-consent events—75% short of the minimum threshold. For most small WooCommerce stores, modeling never activates. You just have missing data.

This isn’t a configuration error. It’s a fundamental mismatch between what GA4 was designed for and what small stores actually experience. Here’s why your reports look broken and what you can actually do about it.

The Threshold Problem Nobody Explains

According to Google Analytics Help documentation, GA4 behavioral modeling requires at least 1,000 events per day with analytics_storage denied for at least 7 days. It also requires at least 1,000 daily users sending events with analytics_storage granted for at least 7 of the previous 28 days.

Let’s do the math for a typical small WooCommerce store:

• 500 daily visitors
• 50% consent rate (optimistic for EU stores)
• 250 consenting visitors (below the 1,000 threshold)
• 250 non-consenting visitors (below the 1,000 threshold)

You’re 75% short on both requirements. Behavioral modeling will never activate for your store. The data gaps from non-consenting visitors stay gaps.

If you’re in the EU with a stricter consent implementation, your consent rate might be closer to 30-40%. That makes the math even worse—you’d need over 3,000 daily visitors to qualify for modeling.

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What Small Stores Actually See

After implementing Consent Mode V2—which is required for continued Google advertising—small store owners consistently report 90-95% drops in their metrics (Matomo analysis via Complianz, 2025). They expected modeling to fill the gaps. It doesn’t.

Here’s what you’re actually experiencing:

• “(other)” in traffic sources: Not enough data to attribute sessions properly
• Thresholding warnings: Reports hide demographic data when user counts are low
• Conversion gaps: Non-consenting visitors who purchase appear nowhere in your funnel
• User counts that don’t add up: Because they literally can’t—Google is hiding data to protect privacy

Google’s documentation even admits this limitation: “It may take more than 7 days of meeting the data threshold within those 28 days to train the model successfully; however it’s possible that even the additional data won’t be sufficient for Analytics to train the model.”

Translation: meeting the threshold doesn’t guarantee modeling will work. You might clear every hurdle and still see incomplete data. Google’s machine learning model applies additional undisclosed criteria that can disqualify your property even after meeting the published requirements.

Data Thresholding: The Hidden Reports Problem

Beyond behavioral modeling, GA4 applies data thresholding—a feature that withholds or aggregates data when user or event counts fall below Google-defined minimums. According to Google Analytics Help, this protects individual user identity.

You cannot adjust these thresholds. They’re set by Google, not configurable by property owners.

For small stores, this means:

• Demographic reports: Often completely hidden or showing “(not set)”
• User explorer: Limited visibility into individual journeys
• Conversion paths: Insufficient data for meaningful attribution
• Cohort analysis: Cohorts too small to display
• Geography reports: City-level data aggregated or hidden

The workarounds suggested by most guides—extending date ranges, using broader segments—help marginally but don’t solve the fundamental problem: you don’t have enough users for GA4’s design assumptions. Extending your date range from 7 days to 30 days just shows you the same incomplete picture over a longer period.

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The Honest Traffic Requirement

GA4 was designed for enterprise-scale traffic. The 1,000 daily event threshold means a store needs roughly 2,000+ daily visitors at 50% consent rate to qualify for any modeling. That’s 730,000 annual visitors minimum—far above most WooCommerce stores.

Here’s the traffic math broken down:

• 1,000 consenting users required: Need 2,000 daily visitors at 50% consent
• 1,000 non-consenting events required: Same 2,000 visitors to meet this threshold
• Both requirements must be met simultaneously: For 7+ days in a 28-day period
• Additional undisclosed criteria: Google’s ML model may still reject your property

If your store gets fewer than 2,000 daily visitors, GA4 behavioral modeling is not designed for you. This isn’t a bug. It’s the intended behavior for the product you’re using. Google built GA4 for enterprise advertisers, not small WooCommerce stores.

Why “Just Wait for More Traffic” Doesn’t Work

GA4.com’s data thresholding guide suggests: “As your site traffic grows, these thresholds will become less restrictive naturally.”

This advice assumes you can wait. Most small WooCommerce stores need data now—for ad optimization, inventory decisions, marketing attribution. You can’t make decisions on hidden data while hoping traffic eventually grows enough for GA4 to function properly.

The compounding problem: the data you’re missing today doesn’t get recovered later. When your traffic eventually crosses thresholds, you won’t retroactively see what happened during the months or years before. The gaps are permanent.

Every ad dollar you spend while waiting is optimized against incomplete data. Every inventory decision is based on partial visibility. The cost of waiting isn’t just frustration—it’s real business impact from decisions made with artificially limited information.

The Alternative: Your Data, Your Rules

GA4’s thresholds exist because Google hosts your data and applies privacy protections at the platform level. When you collect first-party data to your own BigQuery, those restrictions disappear.

BigQuery doesn’t threshold your data. It’s your warehouse. You see every event you captured, regardless of how small your traffic volume is.

Transmute Engine™ sends complete event data to BigQuery in a flat schema you control. No modeling requirements because you’re capturing actual events, not estimates. No thresholding because the data sits in infrastructure you own. Small stores get the same data quality as enterprise—just at smaller scale.

The same event that GA4 hides behind a threshold appears in full in your BigQuery dataset. Same customer. Same purchase. Complete visibility.

This isn’t about replacing GA4 entirely. You can send data to both GA4 (for the reports you’re used to) and BigQuery (for complete visibility). Same events, dual destinations, one configuration. When GA4 hides something behind a threshold, you check BigQuery for the full picture.

Key Takeaways

• GA4 requires 1,000+ daily events in both consent states: Most small stores never qualify for behavioral modeling
• Thresholding hides data automatically: Cannot be disabled or adjusted by property owners
• 90-95% data drops are common: After Consent Mode V2 implementation without sufficient traffic for modeling
• 2,000+ daily visitors needed: To realistically qualify for GA4 modeling at 50% consent rate
• First-party BigQuery has no thresholds: Your data warehouse, your complete visibility

Stop fighting GA4’s design limitations. Collect your data where thresholds don’t apply. See how Transmute Engine sends complete events to your BigQuery at seresa.io.