Compare Anonymous and Recognized Traffic
Compare anonymous and recognized traffic in Hardal using Acquisition scopes, session counts, and visitor metrics.
Use Hardal's traffic scopes to review activity with and without recognized visitor identity. This helps a marketing team understand the measurement context behind acquisition results without treating anonymous sessions as missing visits.
Start with the definitions
Overview's Sessions metric counts recorded session IDs, while Consented Visitors counts distinct non-empty visitor IDs. Consent Rate uses the share of sessions with a visitor ID; it is not a count of banner-button clicks or a complete legal consent audit.
Review Sessions and Visitors and Consent & Privacy before interpreting these numbers as people.
Compare Acquisition scopes
Set the report scope
Open Acquisition for one tenant, source, completed period, and timezone.
Record attribution settings
Record the selected conversion events, model, and lookback window.
Compare traffic scopes
Review Consented Traffic, Unconsented Traffic, and All Traffic in Configuration, keeping the other choices fixed.
Restore the intended configuration
Note the effective scope with each result and restore your team's intended configuration after the comparison.
The configuration is a report setting, not a control that grants visitor consent. Do not assume other reports adopt the same scope automatically; check each report's available controls.
Use the comparison responsibly
Anonymous sessions can still have source, campaign, page activity, and a same-session outcome when that context is collected. Recognizing activity across visits additionally depends on identity and supported attribution matching. Missing identity alone does not establish that all traffic should be Direct.
Different scopes describe different populations. Avoid adding separately attributed conversion results together as if they must reproduce a third scope exactly. Use How Attribution Works for the conceptual model.
If the identity share changes, inspect your banner integration and collected event/session context before drawing a marketing conclusion. These reports describe stored measurement data, not whether a particular implementation satisfies legal requirements.