How we count your visitors, and what Google Analytics would add

A briefing for clients who ask for Google Analytics. Written to be handed over, so it argues both sides honestly — a client who feels sold to will not believe the part that matters.

The short version

You have two instruments available, and they measure different things. Neither is "the truth" and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling one of them.

• Our counting happens on our own server. Every request for a page is counted as it is served. Nothing is placed on your visitor's device, nothing is sent to a third party, and there is nothing for a browser to block.
• Google Analytics 4 runs a script inside your visitor's browser. It can see things a server cannot — how far someone scrolled, whether they came back three weeks later — but only for visitors who consent to it and whose browser lets it run.

You can have both. What follows is what each one actually costs you.

What our counting gives you

What it cannot do, stated plainly

• It cannot follow one person across visits. No identifier is stored, so a visitor who returns next week is a new visit. Server counting cannot tell you "40% of my visitors are returning."
• It cannot see behaviour inside a page — scroll depth, time on page, which button was hovered.
• It has no demographics. No age, no interests.
• It cannot build a remarketing audience. If you want to show ads to people who visited but did not call, that needs the Google tag. There is no server-side substitute for this one.
• It counts requests, not people, so it over-counts where Analytics under-counts. Bots and link previews are filtered, but no filter is perfect.

What Google Analytics 4 adds

Everything in the list above that ours cannot do: returning visitors, scroll and engagement, demographics where Google has them, and remarketing audiences. It is also the tool you have used for years, and the reports are familiar.

GA4 is free. Agencies commonly charge $500–$5,000 to install it, largely because clients expect analytics to be a line item. We are telling you that so you can judge our own price for it.

What it costs you, which is not money

1. A cookie consent banner, and it is not optional. GA4 sets cookies (_ga) which are not "strictly necessary", so in the EU, the UK, Quebec and a growing list of places, you must ask permission before the script runs. Loading Analytics first and asking afterwards is the violation regulators actually fine.

2. The banner is what costs you the data. This is the part most people get backwards. Ad blockers are the famous problem, but the banner is the bigger one — a visitor who clicks "reject" is invisible to GA4 by design, and the law requires "reject" to be as easy to click as "accept". You lose most on the visitors who are most careful, and careful visitors are not a random sample of your customers.

3. Ad and tracker blockers remove some of the rest. Roughly 30% of internet users worldwide run one. Reported US rates are near 37% on desktop and 15% on mobile. Every estimate of what GA4 specifically loses comes from a company selling an alternative to GA4, so treat those figures as an argument rather than a measurement — but the direction is not in dispute, and Google's script is on every blocklist. For your customers — homeowners on a phone, not developers — the loss sits at the lower end.

4. Safari shortens the memory. Apple's tracking prevention caps script-set cookies at seven days. A customer who visits in January and again in March is counted as two different new people.

5. It slows the page and adds a third party. Every visitor's browser makes a request to Google before your page finishes. It is not fatal, and it is not free.

The one thing that works either way

Google Ads conversion tracking does not need any of this. When someone clicks your ad, Google puts a click identifier in the web address. Our server reads it when the enquiry arrives and reports the conversion back to Google — no script, no cookie, no banner.

So the number that Google's bidding actually learns from keeps working whether or not you install Analytics. Analytics is what you look at. Conversions are what makes the advertising get better. Those are different jobs, and only one of them requires the banner.

What we recommend, and why we will still do it your way

Start without Analytics. You get a clean site, no banner, no consent record-keeping, and your ad conversions still report. If after a few months you find a question our numbers genuinely cannot answer — most often "who is coming back?" or "I want to remarket to visitors" — we add GA4 and the banner then.

If you want it from day one, we will fit it. It is your site. We would rather you choose it knowing the banner is the price than discover the banner later and think we hid it.

This briefing is the information we have compiled and believe to be accurate at the time of writing. It is not legal advice, and the rules on consent differ by country and change. Where a specific obligation applies to your business, take advice from a lawyer in your jurisdiction.