Industry · Media and publishers
A publisher's audience comes from search, social, newsletters and referrals, and it is counted by analytics that loses readers twice: at the consent banner, and to ad blockers that recognise the tracking domain. Sealmetrics counts pageviews without cookies from a subdomain of your own domain, reads the site by section and credits newsletter and subscription sign-ups to the last click of their session.
Content groups · first-party subdomain · newsletter and subscription conversions · last click per session · EU-hosted in Dublin
Quick answer
Analytics for media and publishers has to show which sections, channels and articles bring readers, newsletter sign-ups and subscriptions, on a count that is not decided by the consent banner or by a blocklist. Publisher analytics loses readers twice: tools that wait for consent do not record visitors who reject the banner, and ad blockers stop scripts loaded from known third-party tracking domains. Sealmetrics counts pageviews without cookies. Served from a subdomain of the publisher's own domain, its tracker does not match those lists, which reduces the loss to blockers but does not remove it: a custom filter rule can still block it. A group parameter sorts pages into sections such as article, category or video, and newsletter and subscription sign-ups are conversions credited to the last click of their session. It builds no reader profiles, measures no engagement time per reader and does not follow a reader from paywall to subscription across visits.
Why the audience report misleads
An audience team asks the same questions every week. Each answer passes through a filter that removes part of the readership before it is counted, and it does not remove the same share everywhere.
| The weekly question | Where it is answered today | What goes wrong | What changes when it is measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| How much was each section read? | GA4 pages and screens report | Readers who reject the banner or block the analytics script are missing | Pageviews by content group, counted without cookies from your own subdomain |
| Which channels bring readers? | GA4 acquisition reports | The loss differs by channel; traffic with no usable source lands in Direct or Unassigned | Entrances by source, medium and referrer, without consent loss |
| Does the newsletter bring readers to the site? | Email platform click report | It counts clicks in the email, not the visits that reach the site | Visits and sign-ups from UTM-tagged newsletter links, credited to that session |
| Which articles start the visits that sign up? | Newsletter tool and GA4 conversions | A sign-up from a visit that was not recorded has no page and no channel | Newsletter sign-ups by landing page, content group and campaign |
| What happens at the paywall? | Subscription platform | Knows the subscriber, not the channel of the visit | Paywall views as microconversions and subscriptions as conversions, by source and campaign |
No publisher parallel run is published yet. On a different kind of site, Incapto, an eCommerce brand on Shopify, GA4 did not record 29% of visits and 45% of pageviews over 48 days, and the gap was largest in the channels a publisher depends on. How ad blockers add to consent loss is covered under ad-blocker impact on analytics; why a subdomain of your own site changes the picture, under first-party data collection.
What the wrong count costs a publisher
Losing readers at the banner and to blockers does not shrink every report by the same amount. It changes which sections, channels and articles look like they work.
At Incapto, GA4 missed 45% of pageviews but 29% of visits, because the visits it did not record browsed 3.3 pages against 1.6. On a publication, the same pattern would make the sections people read in depth look smaller than they are.
In Incapto's parallel run, Sealmetrics recorded 11% more direct traffic than GA4, but 26% more from email, 62% more from organic search and 133% more from organic social. Those are the channels where a publisher finds readers, and effort drifts toward whatever the consent-based report shows.
A newsletter or subscription sign-up from a visit that was never recorded has no landing page and no channel. The articles and campaigns that grow the list cannot be told apart from the ones that do not.
Reading sections, channels and sign-ups
Each step follows the content and media guide in the Sealmetrics documentation. The attribution rules behind the channel numbers are set out in revenue attribution.
In Settings → Pixels, copy the subdomain to create, add an A record for it in your DNS and tell Sealmetrics, which completes the server side. Then replace the t.sealmetrics.com snippet with the one served from your subdomain. Do not run both, or pageviews are counted twice.
Add the group parameter to the tracker in each template, for example group=home, group=article, group=category, group=author or group=video. On single-page sites, set it with sealmetrics({ group }) on each route. The Pages report then shows the group next to each page and filters by it.
Put utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign on every newsletter link and on the links you publish on social platforms and partner sites, so those visits are classified by the campaign rather than by whatever referrer arrives with them.
Fire a newsletter_signup conversion with amount 0 when the sign-up succeeds, and a subscription conversion with the plan price when a reader subscribes. Track the paywall being shown and the plan being selected as microconversions.
Scroll milestones at 25, 50, 75 and 100% of the article, time-on-article thresholds or an engaged_reader event after 50% scroll and 30 seconds are microconversions. They count how often articles reach each milestone, not how long any one reader stays.
Filter the Pages report by content group, compare conversions by landing page and by source, medium and campaign, and use the Properties report to break properties such as category or form location down by campaign.
The calls
Copied from the content and media guide. Once the first-party subdomain is live, the tracker loads from it instead of t.sealmetrics.com and the group parameter works the same. Properties describe the article, never the reader.
The group parameter on the tracker in the article template.
<!-- Article pages -->
<script src="https://t.sealmetrics.com/t.js?id=YOUR_ID&group=article" defer></script>A conversion with amount 0, carrying where the form was and the article's category.
document.querySelectorAll('.newsletter-form').forEach(function(form) {
form.addEventListener('submit', function(e) {
sealmetrics.conv('newsletter_signup', 0, {
form_location: this.dataset.location, // 'header', 'footer', 'inline', 'popup'
article_id: document.body.dataset.postId || 'none',
category: document.body.dataset.category || 'none'
});
});
});A microconversion fired when the paywall appears, with the article and content type.
document.addEventListener('paywallShown', function(e) {
sealmetrics.micro('paywall_shown', {
article_id: document.body.dataset.postId,
content_type: e.detail.contentType // 'premium', 'members_only'
});
});Who uses it in a newsroom
Each team keeps its tools. What changes is the count its weekly editorial and commercial decisions are built on.
Know which channels bring readers to each section.
Entrances and pageviews by source, medium and content group, counted without consent loss.
UTM parametersSee which articles and campaigns grow the list.
Newsletter sign-ups as conversions, by landing page and by the UTMs of the email or social link.
Conversion trackingUnderstand where paywall views turn into subscriptions.
Paywall views as microconversions and subscriptions with their price as conversions, by source and campaign. Subscriber history stays in the subscription platform.
Revenue attributionBuild section and channel dashboards on a count the newsroom accepts.
The BigQuery connector, included on every plan, writes daily traffic, pages, landing pages, conversions and microconversions to your own project.
BigQuery connectorEvidence so far
No media or publisher customer case is published, so this page quotes none. The figures below come from Incapto, a specialty coffee eCommerce brand on Shopify, measured in parallel with GA4. They show how uneven the loss is by channel and by browsing depth on a real site; they are context, not a publisher result.
of pageviews GA4 did not record over 48 days, against 29% of visits
more email traffic recorded than GA4 over ten days, and +62% from organic search
pages per visit in the visits GA4 missed, against 1.6 in those it recorded
What it does not do
These limits come from measuring without identifying anyone, and from how ad blockers work. Attribution is last click within each session, by design.
Served from your subdomain, the tracker is far less likely to be blocked, but a custom filter rule can still target it. The default t.sealmetrics.com address is a third-party request that blocklists can include.
No reader IDs, reading history or engagement time per reader. A reader who comes back tomorrow is a new visit.
Paywall views and subscriptions are counted as events by source and campaign. Sealmetrics does not follow one reader from a first article to a later subscription.
Churn, renewals and lifetime value per subscriber stay in the subscription platform. An automatic renewal has no visit behind it.
Sealmetrics does not connect to ad servers or SSPs and sends them nothing. Joining ad revenue with pages is done outside it, for example in BigQuery.
Set the group parameter in the page templates. Content groups defined as URL rules in the dashboard are stored in your browser only and are not shared with teammates.
Questions publishers ask
Better when the tracker is served from a subdomain of your own domain. Ad blockers such as uBlock Origin, AdBlock Plus and Brave Shields work mostly from lists of known third-party tracking domains, and a first-party subdomain does not match those lists. That reduces the loss; it does not eliminate it, because a custom filter rule can still block your subdomain. The default t.sealmetrics.com address is a third-party request that lists can target.
Add the group parameter to the tracker in each template, such as group=article, group=category or group=video, or set it with JavaScript on single-page sites. The Pages report shows each page's group and filters by it, and landing pages carry the same label next to their entrances and conversions.
Per session, yes. Fire a newsletter_signup conversion when the sign-up succeeds: it is credited to the last click of that session, and the landing pages report shows the page where the session started. A reader who read an article last week and signs up today is credited to today's visit.
As counts, yes. Track the paywall being shown and the plan being selected as microconversions and the subscription as a conversion with its price, then compare them by source, medium and campaign. It does not follow an individual reader from the paywall to a subscription across visits, and subscriber retention stays in the subscription platform.
With microconversions: scroll milestones at 25, 50, 75 and 100%, time-on-article thresholds, or an engaged_reader event after 50% scroll and 30 seconds. These count how many times articles reach each milestone. There is no engagement time profile per reader.
No. Sealmetrics has no ad-server or SSP integration and sends no data to them. Traffic, pages and conversions can be exported with the BigQuery connector or read through the REST API, both included on every plan, where a data team can join them with ad revenue from another system.
Sealmetrics sets no cookies and stores nothing on the reader's device. Advertising, header bidding and audience tags on a publisher site usually do, and still need consent. Whether your analytics setup is exempt from consent depends on its configuration and on your national authority's criteria.
Audience measurement review
Thirty minutes: we look at how one section and your newsletter are measured today, and show how content groups, the first-party subdomain and sign-up conversions would be set up.