Data Collection Blocked By Consent Settings
Symptom: Visitor counts are much lower than your Shopify or analytics figures, experiments accumulate traffic slowly, or heatmaps and session recordings capture far fewer sessions than expected , particularly from visitors in the EU or California.
What consent gating does
For GDPR and CCPA compliance, FigPii can delay all data collection until a visitor actively consents. When this is enabled on your domain, FigPii will not start A/B test data collection, heatmaps or session recordings until consent is granted.
This is working as intended, not a fault. But it has consequences worth understanding.
What it affects
Consent gating applies to everything FigPii collects, not just recordings:
- A/B experiment visitor and conversion data
- Heatmaps
- Session recordings
- Polls
A visitor who declines, ignores the banner, or leaves the page before responding will not appear in your experiment data at all.
What this means for your results
Your visitor counts will be lower than your other analytics tools. If your consent rate is 60%, you are measuring roughly 60% of your traffic. This is expected and does not invalidate your experiments , the same gate applies equally to your control and all variations, so the comparison between them remains valid.
It does affect how long tests take. Fewer measured visitors means longer to reach a conclusion. Factor your consent rate into duration estimates.
It may affect who you're measuring. Visitors who accept consent banners may not behave identically to those who decline. This is a limitation to be aware of rather than something that can be corrected.
Checking your configuration
Consent handling is configured per domain in your FigPii settings. If your visitor numbers look unexpectedly low, check whether consent gating is enabled for that domain and what your acceptance rate is.
If you use a consent management platform on your Shopify store, confirm that FigPii is categorised correctly within it. FigPii is typically classified under analytics or performance cookies. If it's categorised under marketing or advertising, you will lose data from every visitor who accepts analytics but declines marketing — a very common pattern.
If you are not intentionally using consent gating
If consent gating is enabled but you didn't configure it deliberately, and your legal obligations don't require it, disabling it will restore full data collection. Confirm your compliance position before changing this setting.