Google introduces Behavioral Modeling in Google Analytics

Google this week announced the introduction of Behavioral Modeling for Consent Mode, in Google Analytics. Behavioral Modeling for Consent Mode fills data gaps by modeling the behavior of users who decline analytics cookies based on the behavior of similar users who accept analytics cookies.

According to Google, the training data used for modeling is based on the consented user data (observed data) from the property where modeling is activated.

Audiences, Realtime Reports, Segments, Predictive Metrics, Data Export do not support Behavioral Modeling.

Behavioral Modeling will work only if consent mode is enabled across all pages, and the app/site has at least 1,000 daily events with analytics_storage=’denied’ for at least 7 days, and at least 1,000 daily users sending events with analytics_storage=’granted’ for at least 7 of the previous 28 days.

Google says it may take over 7 days of meeting the data threshold within those 28 days to successfully train the model.

Note that behavioral modeling starts from the date a given property becomes eligible.

Examples of questions Behavioral data answer

• How many Daily Active Users do I have?
• How many new users did I acquire from my last campaign?
• What is the user journey from landing on my website to actually making a purchase?
• How many of my site visitors are based in Germany vs. the UK?
• What is the difference in user behavior between mobile vs. web visitors?

What is modeled data and observed data?

Google uses modeled data when users don’t grant consent to the use of Analytics cookies or equivalent app identifiers. Events are not associated with a persistent user identifier. Google Analytics applies machine learning to estimate the behavior of those users based on the behavior of similar users who accept analytics cookies or equivalent app identifiers.

Observed data is when users visit a site and grant consent for Analytics cookies or when they don’t opt out of personalization using advertising ID in Android Settings, Analytics associates user behavior with various identifiers to provide continuity in measurement.