Full Answer

Here's the thing — Consent Mode V2 does two separate jobs, and only one of them works at any size. When a visitor declines cookies, GA4 still receives anonymous cookieless pings. That part always runs. The second job, behavioral modeling, is what turns those pings back into estimated sessions and conversions — and Google's own documentation sets its activation bar at 1,000 denied and 1,000 granted consent events per day, sustained for 7 consecutive days. Dip below it and the model can switch back off.Run the numbers for a typical WooCommerce store. With EU cookie rejection rates sitting at 40–70% (GDPR studies, 2023), a shop doing a few hundred sessions a day never clears either side of that threshold. The reports still look plausible — they're just missing the entire declined share, which is why so many owners set up GA4 and ended up with less data than before. And consent is only one leak: ad blockers strip tracking scripts before a banner even loads, hiding a further slice of WooCommerce traffic that no model touches.The question isn't whether Consent Mode is switched on. The question is whether your store is big enough for it to do anything. Below the threshold, the dependable route is first-party, server-side collection — events recorded at your own server rather than reconstructed by Google's estimates — which is the approach tools like Transmute Engine take for stores of this size.