A few months back I had an odd problem. I was working with a tech SEO to implement Google Analytics tracking on a WooCommerce store. We were tracking the usual metics – sales, enquiries, clicks to phone numbers. It was something I’ve done a number of times before, but for some reason traffic numbers pretty much dropped, and I couldn’t work out why. This article will take you through my issue of Google Analytics misreporting WooCommerce traffic, why it does this, and how you can fix it.
What caused our drop in traffic from Google Analytics?
After setting up Google Analytics tracking in a way that I believed to be correct, the tech SEO noticed a day or two later that traffic to the site had dropped considerably. This was something I noticed when creating the goals and events in question – I was not showing up in Google realtime data, and me carrying out the actions which I knew should be tracked (email link clicks, product add to carts clicks, etc) was not registering as well. I wasn’t sure what I did to cause this issue but it seemed like users were being blocked. This was confirmed a couple of days later in that a lot of traffic (not all) was being blocked in Google Analytics.
I installed the excellent Google Analytics Debugger tool, that prints to the console how the site interacts with Google Analytics. Sure enough after activating this Chrome extension and testing a page load the first row in the Google Console says that it’s waiting for an update before it does something, with a list of regions.
Comparing this against another site we didn’t have this processing command step, and activating this step seemed to be blocking EU nations and a few other countries (UK, Iceland and Switzerland for three). As 99% of the traffic was UK based, it meant that this was not being reported in Google Analytics, and I couldn’t figure out why, as another site that had a similar setup was allowing EU and UK traffic to be viewed.
After a bit of back and forth and diagnosing (including speaking with the folks at Polka Dot Data – seriously if you need your Google Analytics setup audited and optimised speak with Anna and her team!), I diagnosed the problem as within a plugin I had installed – WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration, which was installed and setup on the site that had Google Analytics misreporting WooCommerce traffic, but not set up on the site that was reporting traffic correctly.
Check WooCommerce Settings
It seems to be that with WooCommerce’s GA Integration – when you have set it up and you don’t have the WP Consent API plugin installed and a compatible cookie banner plugin installed – blocks traffic from the EU. This is confirmed on the top of the documentation page.
Now, I should say that WooCommerce’s approach appears to be correct. You really should not be tracking EU and UK users without installing a cookie banner. At the time of writing in late March 2025 Google Site Kit seems to track users from the EU even without requiring explicit consent. This may have changed by the time of publication.
Google Site Kit – a popular way to install and setup Google properties – seems to point folks towards Consent Mode, but it’s an optional step, which (and I’m not a lawyer) seems to be incorrect. My advice would be to install the WP Consent API plugin and a compatible plugin which will help track users. I used Complianz, but there’s a number of plugins out there that do similar things.
Of course, the other way is to go for a privacy focussed analytics approach. Something like Koko Analytics does tracking of visitors to your website that is GDPR & CCPA compliant. I am also wanting to investigate Plausible at some point. That removes the need for banners totally. Should you need somebody to look at your WordPress analytics installation and either setup a cookie banner that actually works or setup a privacy focussed analytics solution for WordPress, then – well – you know where I am.