Cookie banners cost EU businesses €1.64 billion annually. EU users waste 334 million hours per year clicking through them. And yet, 54% of users randomly accept without reading, while 26% randomly reject—undermining the very goal of informed consent.
On November 19, 2025, the European Commission published a proposal that could change everything: the EU Digital Omnibus Regulation (COM(2025) 837).
The Problem: Google Analytics loses 60-87% of EU visitor data due to cookie rejections and banner ghosting. Cookieless analytics solves this by tracking without cookies, consent banners, or IP addresses.
What You'll Learn:
Key Takeaways:
For a complete overview of cookieless analytics, see our Cookieless Analytics: Complete Guide 2026.
Both Sealmetrics and Plausible Analytics position themselves as privacy-first alternatives to Google Analytics, offering cookieless analytics that respects user privacy. But despite surface similarities, these tools take fundamentally different technical approaches—differences that dramatically impact data accuracy, legal compliance, and business outcomes.
The most critical distinction: Plausible uses hashed IP addresses for session tracking and may require consent in strict interpretations of GDPR, while Sealmetrics eliminates IP storage entirely, achieving true consentless analytics under GDPR Article 6(1)(f).
This comprehensive comparison examines both platforms across 15 key dimensions: technical architecture, privacy implementation, GDPR compliance, data accuracy, features, pricing, and real-world performance. Whether you're migrating from Google Analytics or choosing between privacy-focused alternatives, this guide provides the detailed analysis you need.
The digital analytics landscape has reached a critical inflection point in 2025. With Google Chrome completing its third-party cookie phase-out in Q2 2025 and European regulators issuing over €1.4 billion in GDPR fines throughout 2024, privacy-first analytics isn't just a competitive advantage—it's a business necessity.
Traditional cookie-based analytics tools like Google Analytics are experiencing catastrophic data loss, with 87% of German users and 73% of French users rejecting cookie consent banners. Meanwhile, businesses using privacy-first, cookieless analytics solutions are capturing 100% of their visitor data without legal risk.
This comprehensive guide explains why privacy-first analytics matters in 2025, how it works technically, and why solutions like Sealmetrics—which combines cookieless tracking with consentless data collection—represent the future of web analytics.
The biggest threat to your analytics isn't cookie rejection—it's cookie banner ghosting.
While marketers obsess over rejection rates (users clicking "Reject All"), the silent killer of analytics data is the 40-60% of visitors who simply ignore cookie consent banners entirely. They don't accept. They don't reject. They just... ignore it.
This phenomenon, called "banner ghosting" or "decision avoidance," represents basic human psychology: when faced with an unwanted decision, people procrastinate or avoid it entirely. Cookie consent banners trigger this avoidance behavior at scale.
Marketers love real-time dashboards. Seeing how many people are on your site “right now” is exciting. But in Europe, the law is strict: not all “real-time tracking” is legal without consent.
Access to Real Time Tracking Consent Guide
In this article, we break down what the CNIL (France) and the AEPD (Spain) actually say, why reports like “last 30 minutes” may put you at legal risk, and how Sealmetrics solves this by design.
Last Updated: November 13, 2025
Cookieless analytics has emerged as the solution to this data loss crisis. Unlike traditional cookie-based platforms like Google Analytics, cookieless analytics captures 100% of visitor data without requiring consent banners, cookies, or personal identifiers like IP addresses.
This complete guide explains how cookieless analytics works, why it's GDPR compliant without consent, and how platforms like Sealmetrics provide businesses with accurate, complete data while respecting user privacy.
Understanding long-term user behavior is crucial for business growth, but traditional analytics platforms face a critical limitation: GDPR requires deleting data after consent expires, typically forcing 6-13 month retention limits. Sealmetrics solves this with cookieless tracking that enables 25-month data retention without requiring user consent.