40–60%
Consent rejection
GA4 depends on cookies. Average EU visitor rejects, GA4 never sees them.
vs Google Analytics 4
GA4 shows you 40% of your traffic. SealMetrics shows 100%.
GA4 works fine for what Google needs. Not for the CMO defending a €2M budget. This is the honest comparison — and why most eCommerce teams end up running both in parallel.
14-day free trial · No credit card · 4-minute setup
Updated · By Rafa Jiménez, Founder, SealMetrics
The single source of truth European eCommerce signs against
Dreamplace Hotels recovered +30% more traffic vs GA4 and closed a 15–20% gap in sales attribution against their CRM. Palladium Hotel Group recovered 35% of unattributed bookings and improved Display CPS by +165%.
The gap
What GA4 doesn't see.
Four points where GA4's architecture loses data by design. Not bugs — this is the product working as intended for Google Ads' use case.
~25%
Ad blockers
Block google-analytics.com. GA4 never receives the ping.
Sampling
Volume thresholds
Above certain volume, GA4 samples and models. Black Friday = estimates.
US-hosted
Schrems II
Data crosses to US. Subject to ongoing EU regulatory challenge.
What the dashboard says vs what happened
What your dashboard shows vs what actually happened.
Five patterns we see across European eCommerce accounts. Most customers find at least two of these gaps in their own data within the first 30 days running SealMetrics alongside GA4.
Organic search traffic
GA4 reports
Sampled and cookie-filtered. Sessions where consent was rejected are missing from the organic channel entirely.
SealMetrics captures
100% observed, server-side, consent-independent.
Consequence — Organic channels are typically 2–4× bigger than GA4 reports. The SEO investment you're about to cut may be your best-performing channel.
Meta campaign conversions
GA4 reports
Partial. Pixel-dependent. De-duplicated against modelled Consent Mode v2 estimations.
SealMetrics captures
Server-side conversions, independent of consent rejection or pixel-blocking.
Consequence — True ROAS is often meaningfully higher than GA4 suggests. The campaign you were about to kill may have been working the whole time.
Direct traffic bucket
GA4 reports
40–60% of total sessions attributed to “direct” or “(none)”. The channel that grew fastest quarter-over-quarter — and you can't assign it.
SealMetrics captures
Real channel attribution preserved server-side. The “direct” bucket returns to its actual share.
Consequence — Direct stops masking the campaigns that were secretly carrying the quarter. Attribution becomes defensible in a budget review.
Real-time data during peak events (Black Friday)
GA4 reports
Delayed, sampled above threshold, modelled reconciliations that land hours later.
SealMetrics captures
Real-time event stream with zero sampling, regardless of traffic peak.
Consequence — The 2 AM call on Black Friday gets made on real data, not an estimate that reconciles three hours after the decision window closed.
Booking attribution (hotels & travel)
GA4 reports
Cookie-dependent, consent-gated. A share of real CRM bookings simply doesn't appear in marketing reports.
SealMetrics captures
Booking conversions counted server-side at landing-channel level — independent of consent state.
Consequence — 20–25% of real CRM bookings stop being invisible. Agencies and internal teams align on the same booking number.
The exact size of the gap depends on your market mix, device mix and consent acceptance rate. No client sees all five — but almost every one sees one or two.
Comparison
Feature by feature. No spin.
The exact comparison a CTO or CMO needs before signing. Honest about GA4's strengths; direct about where it fails for an eCommerce team deciding with real money.
Capability
Google Analytics 4
SealMetrics
Data capture
Consent required
Yes · 40–60% reject
No · 100% captured
Ad blocker affected
Yes · ~25% blocked
No · first-party
Cookies on visitor device
Required
None
Sampling at scale
Yes · above threshold
Never · full resolution
Attribution
Channel attribution
Cookie-dependent
Session-level, consent-free
Direct/(none) bucket
40–60% of sessions
Real share (typically <10%)
Last-click
Limited
Default · on complete data
Infrastructure
Data residency
US · Google infra
EU · Dublin, Ireland
Schrems II exposure
Yes · ongoing challenge
Clean
Sub-processors outside EU
Yes
None
Integrations
Google Ads native
Yes
Via BigQuery export
Meta / TikTok Ads
Via external sync
Native + BigQuery
BigQuery export
Yes (sampled above threshold)
Yes · full resolution
MCP / AI agents
No native support
Native MCP server
Pricing
Price
Free (your data trains ads)
From €499/mo annual
Per-event overage
Hidden limits trigger sampling
No overage billing
Data retention
14 months default
24 months included
Not "GA4 is broken". GA4 works well for the Google Ads ecosystem. For defending a marketing budget on complete data, it falls short. Run both for 30 days and you decide.
Methodology · 30 days
Run both alongside. Compare against your CRM.
We're not asking you to replace GA4. We're asking you to run both in parallel for 30 days, comparing each against your actual CRM. Then you decide which number to sign against.
Both installed
GA4 stays where it is. SealMetrics installs in 15 minutes with one script tag. Both running on the same traffic.
Calibration
We help you map channels, UTMs and microconversions. Both systems see the same traffic — and report very differently.
Comparison
CRM in hand, you compare channels, conversions and revenue. You see exactly where GA4 falls short on your own data.
Decision
Most teams sign SealMetrics as source of truth and keep GA4 for specific Google Ads integrations. No migration forced.
FAQ
The objections, answered.
What CMOs and CTOs actually ask before replacing (or complementing) GA4.
Still have questions? Our team — including the founder — is one message away.
Talk to us →Switched from a Google-Analytics stack
How Palladium Hotel Group recovered 40% of unattributed traffic.
“The data SealMetrics delivers is agnostic, unbiased and neutral. There’s no black box.”
Toni Andújar · Digital & Direct Sales Director · Palladium Hotel Group
Palladium ran SealMetrics alongside their existing GA-tier stack. The audit surfaced 40% of inbound traffic with no source/medium attribution, 35% of bookings unassigned to a channel in GA4, and a +165% Cost-per-Search improvement on Display once the SealMetrics measurement model drove DV360 decisions. They kept GA4 as the Google Ads conduit and made revenue decisions on SealMetrics.
Read the full Palladium case study →Run both for 30 days. Then decide.
Install SealMetrics alongside GA4. Compare with your own CRM. If the gap isn't real, you owe us nothing.
Built by a founder · supported by a founder · EU-hosted by design
How we compared
Methodology + sources
- Sources
- Public vendor documentation for Google Analytics 4 (pricing, feature lists, EU data residency statements). G2 and Capterra reviews referenced where they illuminate workflow differences. SealMetrics data points come from our own architecture and from named customer audits (Palladium Hotel Group, Dreamplace Hotels).
- Pricing as of
- Pricing data is current as of . Vendor pricing changes; we review quarterly and re-anchor on every major competitor release. SealMetrics pricing comes from /pricing (single source of truth).
- Disclosure
- SealMetrics is our product. We built this comparison to be useful even if you don’t choose us — every competitor mention is verifiable against its public documentation. If you find a fact that’s wrong or has changed, write to us and we’ll correct it within 48 hours.
- Update cadence
- Reviewed quarterly. Flagged for immediate update when a competitor ships a major change (pricing, EU hosting, attribution model). The page “updated” date below the H1 reflects the most recent edit.