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Every Irish business website should be tracking visitor behaviour — but tracking it correctly, which in 2026 means in full compliance with GDPR as enforced by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) replaced Universal Analytics in 2023 and is now the only option for new implementations. Its GDPR status in Ireland has been the subject of significant regulatory attention across Europe, and the correct setup is more nuanced than most “install Google Analytics 4” guides acknowledge. This walkthrough covers both the technical implementation and the compliance requirements specific to Irish websites.
GA4: What Changed and Why It Matters
Universal Analytics processed data using a session-based model — visits, pageviews, bounce rate, session duration. Google Analytics 4 uses an event-based model where every user interaction — page view, scroll, click, form submission, purchase — is captured as an event with associated parameters. This produces more granular data across devices and sessions, but also requires a different mindset when reading reports: the metrics you are used to from UA have changed names and definitions.
The practical differences for Irish businesses: Google Analytics 4 has built-in IP anonymisation by default (removing the last octet of IP addresses before storage), which was optional in Universal Analytics. It uses machine learning modelling to estimate the behaviour of users who declined cookies — which partially compensates for the significant proportion of Irish visitors who will decline Google analytics consent under a compliant cookie banner. And it requires explicit consent before collection in compliance with EU law, which is enforced by the GDPR-aware consent management setup described in this guide.
GDPR Compliance for Google Analytics in Ireland
This section matters more than the technical setup. The Data Protection Commission has been among the most active privacy regulators in the EU, and Irish businesses running non-compliant Google analytics do so with real enforcement risk. The core compliance requirement is simple to state and requires careful implementation: Google Analytics may only collect data after the visitor has given explicit, informed, freely-given consent to Google analytics cookies.
What this means in practice: your GA4 tag must not fire until the visitor clicks Accept (or equivalent) on your cookie consent banner. Pre-ticking the Google analytics consent checkbox, loading GA4 before the banner appears, or using a “by continuing to use this site” implied consent approach are all non-compliant under Irish GDPR implementation. The DPC’s guidance on tracking cookies is explicit on this point.
The practical consequence: a meaningful proportion of your visitors — typically 30–40% in European markets — will decline analytics consent when presented with a genuine choice. Your GA4 data will undercount your actual traffic by that proportion. This is expected, legal, and correct. GA4’s consent mode modelling attempts to estimate aggregate behaviour for non-consenting users (covered below), but you will not have individual-level data for them — and you should not.
Setting Up GA4 on WordPress via Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is the recommended installation method for GA4 on WordPress. It centralises all tag management, makes consent mode integration significantly cleaner, and allows you to add, modify, or remove tracking tags without touching your WordPress theme code.
Step 1: Create a GA4 Property
Go to analytics.google.com and create a new property. Set the reporting timezone to Ireland (UTC+0/+1) and the currency to Euro — getting this right from the start avoids confusing reports later. Under Admin → Data Collection and Modification → Data Collection, review the Google Signals and user data collection settings against your privacy policy before enabling them.
Step 2: Create a GTM Container and Install on WordPress
Create a GTM account and container at tagmanager.google.com. Install the container code on WordPress using either the GTM4WP plugin or Site Kit by Google — both place the required <head> snippet and noscript fallback in the correct positions without manual theme editing.
Step 3: Configure Consent Mode in GTM
Before creating any tags, set up consent mode defaults. In GTM, create a new Custom HTML tag that fires on Consent Initialization — All Pages (before all other tags). This tag sets default consent states to ‘denied’ for all consent types: analytics_storage, ad_storage, functionality_storage, and personalization_storage. This ensures no data is collected before consent is granted, satisfying the DPC requirement.
Step 4: Create the GA4 Tag
Create a new tag of type “Google Tag” and enter your GA4 Measurement ID (G-XXXXXXXXXX). Set the trigger to “All Pages” but add a consent check for analytics_storage — this means the tag loads on all pages but only collects data when consent has been granted. In GTM’s consent settings, enable “Require additional consent for tag to fire” and select analytics_storage.
Integrating GA4 and GTM with CookieYes on WordPress
CookieYes is the most widely deployed cookie consent management platform for Irish WordPress sites, and its GTM integration makes the consent-to-tracking pipeline straightforward to configure correctly.
In CookieYes settings, confirm that Google Analytics cookies are categorised as non-essential (requiring explicit consent). Enable the GTM integration under CookieYes → Settings → Integrations → Google Tag Manager. When enabled, CookieYes automatically pushes consent updates to GTM’s dataLayer when a visitor accepts or declines cookie categories — this fires the consent update event that triggers the consent mode update in GTM, which in turn allows or blocks the GA4 tag from collecting data.
Test the full flow before launch using GTM’s preview mode:
1. Load your site in preview mode. Decline all cookies on the banner. Confirm GA4 is not firing (no GA4 events in the preview panel). 2. Accept analytics cookies. Confirm GA4 now fires a page_view event. 3. Check that the consent update event fired in GTM before the GA4 tag. This three-step test is the only reliable way to verify your implementation is working as intended before you go live.
Key GA4 Reports for Irish Businesses
Once tracking is running correctly, the reports that deliver the most value for an Irish SME website:
Acquisition → Traffic Acquisition: Where is your traffic coming from? Organic search (Google), direct, referral, email, paid, and social. For most Irish business sites, organic search should be driving 40–60% of traffic within twelve to eighteen months of consistent SEO work. If direct traffic is anomalously high, it often indicates a tracking gap — visitors being miscategorised because referral information is being lost.
Engagement → Pages and Screens: Which pages are receiving traffic and how long are visitors engaging with them? Average engagement time per session below 30 seconds on key service pages usually indicates a mismatch between what the page promised in search results and what it delivered. Pages with high traffic and low conversion rate are your best optimisation targets.
Search Console Integration → Queries: Connect GA4 to Google Search Console in GA4’s Admin settings. This surfaces the specific search queries driving traffic to specific pages — the most actionable SEO intelligence available. If a page is receiving impressions for a keyword but the click-through rate is low, your title tag or meta description is not compelling enough for that query.
Conversions: Configure key actions as conversion events: contact form submissions, phone number clicks, email link clicks, and for WooCommerce stores, purchase events. Without conversion tracking, you are measuring traffic with no signal as to whether any of it is turning into business. GA4’s enhanced measurement automatically tracks some events (scroll depth, outbound clicks, file downloads) — configure the business-specific ones in GTM.
GA4 Consent Mode and Modelled Data
GA4’s consent mode (v2) includes a modelling layer that estimates aggregate behaviour for users who declined analytics cookies, using patterns from consenting users with similar characteristics. This modelled data is added to your reports to give you a more complete picture of overall traffic than the consented-only data would show.
The important caveats: modelled data is an estimate, not individual-level tracking. It is visible as a separate segment in GA4 reports and is aggregated rather than user-specific. It does not mean you are tracking non-consenting users — it means GA4 is making informed inferences about what those users probably did, based on similar users who did consent. For Irish businesses making decisions about content strategy, SEO performance, and conversion optimisation, the modelled data provides useful directional signal. For precise attribution of individual sessions, only consented data is available.
If your WordPress site does not have Google analytics running, or if you are unsure whether your current GA4 setup is GDPR-compliant, we can audit and configure the full stack — GTM, GA4, CookieYes integration, and conversion tracking. Get in touch →
