Full Answer

Google designed these thresholds to ensure statistical reliability. Behavioural modelling works by observing how consenting users behave and projecting those patterns onto the anonymised signals from non-consenting users. If the consenting cohort is too small, the observed patterns are not statistically representative. If the denied cohort is too small, there is not enough anonymised signal to model against.

For a typical WooCommerce store with 1,000 daily visitors and a 40% consent rate, the numbers break down as follows: 600 consented visitors generate cookied events — potentially meeting the 1,000 daily granted threshold if event volume per user is high enough. 400 denied visitors generate cookieless pings — well below the 1,000 daily denied threshold. Modelling does not activate.

The threshold is measured in events, not users. A single user session might generate 5–15 events (page views, scrolls, clicks). A store needs roughly 100–200 daily denied users generating typical browsing activity to cross the 1,000 denied events threshold. With a 40% deny rate, that requires 250–500 total daily visitors at minimum — and that only meets one of the two requirements.

Stores that fall below the thresholds see gaps in their GA4 reports for non-consenting users rather than modelled fill-ins. The practical result is that GA4 consent mode, marketed as a solution for cookie restrictions, delivers no modelled data to the majority of WooCommerce stores. Server-side tracking captures actual events from all users regardless of consent mode, eliminating the dependency on Google's modelling thresholds entirely.