Tutorial · 25 August 2026
Leave Google Analytics on. Add a 1 KB script. Compare totals.
GA4 is built for ads identity. Cookie Free Analytics is a 1 KB script and one dashboard. The useful week is not a cutover. It is both tags on the same pages.
We will not invent a percentage for your site. Run both. The difference is mostly people who clicked Reject, plus lists that drop googletagmanager.com. That is the number worth a meeting — not a migration project.
What not to compare
Do not compare GA “active users” to our visitors. Ours collapse nine refreshes with a daily HMAC and forget you tomorrow. GA is a graph for ads. Pageviews are the overlapping fact. Sources are next, if your UTMs are the same five: source, medium, campaign, content, term.
Keep GA if you sell ads on the back of the visit. Add this if you wanted to know whether /pricing moved after a tweet.
The steps
- 1
Leave GA where it is
Do not turn consent mode off as an experiment. You are measuring the hole, not inventing a cleaner GA.
- 2
Add Cookie Free Analytics
Create a site, paste the 1 KB snippet. WordPress: upload the plugin so /cf.js is already first-party. Other hosts: default snippet first, first-party in week two if the hostname is blocked.
- 3
Wait seven UTC days
Compare pageviews, not “users.” GA users are an ads identity. Ours are distinct HMAC tokens per local day. The comparable number is pageviews, then sources.
- 4
Read the gap
If our total is higher, the usual causes are Reject, list blockers, and Safari. If GA is higher, check our hostname filter, a missing snippet on a template, or a SPA you have not hooked — we count pushState.
Questions
- Will you import my GA history?
- No. Dual-run going forward. We do not pretend a property ID is a pageview archive we can swallow.
- Should I delete GA after a week?
- Only if you do not need ads audiences, remarketing, or BigQuery joins. If you need those, keep GA. This script is pageviews, sources, and goals.