BYOViral vs Google Analytics 4

What GA4 does that BYOViral cannot

• Connects to Google Ads for conversion tracking and bidding.
• Exports raw events to BigQuery. The export works with the free BigQuery sandbox; going beyond the sandbox limits is billed, and streaming export costs $0.05 per GB.
• Explorations for funnels, paths and cohorts, plus audiences you can reuse in Google's ad products.
• A paid tier, GA4 360, with higher limits: event data retention up to 50 months instead of 14, and much larger export and sampling thresholds. Google does not publish its price.

If your business runs on Google Ads, or your analysts work in BigQuery, keep GA4. BYOViral is not a replacement for that kind of work.

Where the day-to-day experience differs

Google says GA4 data processing can take 24 to 48 hours, so yesterday's numbers are not always final today. Explorations apply data thresholds in some reports and switch to sampling when a query passes about ten million events on standard properties. Event-level data is kept for two or fourteen months, depending on your setting, and Google shortens that for very large properties.

BYOViral shows visitors as they arrive, with their page, source, approximate location and network. Its daily totals for visitors, pages, sources, countries and devices are kept with no time limit, and a person-by-person visitor log keeps the last 500, 10,000 or 100,000 visitors per site depending on the plan. There is no sampling, because there is no query engine: you read totals and recent visits directly.

The trade-off is depth. GA4 can answer questions BYOViral was never designed to ask. BYOViral answers the common ones, such as how many people came today, from where, and what they read, in a single screen.

Cookies, IP addresses and consent

GA4 sets first-party cookies named _ga and _ga_ followed by a container ID, each lasting two years. For visitors in the EU, Switzerland and the UK, Google says IP addresses are used only to work out location and are then discarded; elsewhere they are used to run the service and the raw address is discarded after use. With consent mode, a denied analytics consent makes GA4 send cookieless pings instead.

BYOViral sets no cookies and uses no browser storage; its script is about 650 bytes. It does keep IP addresses, together with network, approximate location, browser and referrer, in each site's visitor log until those visits roll out of the plan's log size. Daily totals hold no IP addresses.

Moving from GA4 to a cookie-free tool can remove the analytics cookies from your consent setup, but it does not on its own decide whether you need a banner. Advertising pixels, video embeds, chat widgets and the rules where your visitors live all play a part. Ask whoever handles privacy for your site before removing a consent tool.

Limits at a glance

Running both for a month

1. Create a free BYOViral account and add your site.
2. Paste the one-line BYOViral script next to your existing GA4 tag. They run independently.
3. Each day, compare the trend of visitors and top pages rather than the exact totals. GA4 counts cookie-based users who accepted tracking; BYOViral counts unique visitors per day from a server-side hash and leaves out traffic from hosting networks, so the totals will not match.
4. After a few weeks, decide which questions you still need GA4 for. Many small sites keep GA4 only for Ads conversions and read everything else in BYOViral.

If you want a quick primer first, what cookieless analytics is explains the approach in plain terms.