Case study

Feb 3, 2026

Enhancing GA4 tracking accuracy for Canterbury Festival

Helping Canterbury Festival to unlock accurate, actionable insights for better campaign decisions.

76%

Original revenue gap

10.63%

Final revenue gap

28.75%

Final transaction gap

1

Unified consent platform

Canterbury Festival depends on accurate data to understand its audiences, evaluate marketing performance, and plan future activity. With Ticketsolve managing ticketing and sales, the organisation had a reliable source of transactional data at its core.

However, when the team reviewed performance through Google Analytics 4 (GA4), they noticed a clear mismatch. Revenue and transaction volumes reported in GA4 were significantly lower than those shown in Ticketsolve. This discrepancy made it difficult to assess campaign effectiveness and created uncertainty around data-led decision-making.

Rather than treating this as a reporting issue, Canterbury Festival and Ticketsolve worked together to understand the root cause, and address it properly.

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The Challenge: Fragmented Consent, Incomplete Tracking

The issue lay in how consent was managed across Canterbury Festival’s digital ecosystem.

The main festival website and the Ticketsolve booking journey operated on separate domains, each using a different Consent Management Platform. While users could grant consent on the main site, that consent did not carry through to the booking journey. As a result, GA4 did not consistently receive the signals it needed to track sessions and purchases accurately.

In practice, this meant that even when users had given permission, GA4 often recorded purchases as denied or partially tracked events. Over time, this led to a substantial gap between the revenue reported in Ticketsolve and what appeared in GA4, leaving valuable insight missing from the festival’s analytics.

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Context: Why Cross-Domain Tracking Matters

GA4 performs reliably when organisations operate within a single domain, including those using Ticketsolve alone. Challenges emerge when multiple domains and consent platforms are introduced without consistent configuration.

In this scenario, consent management became a critical part of the analytics infrastructure. Without shared consent logic, cross-domain tracking breaks down, not because the tools are faulty, but because the signals they rely on are fragmented.

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The Solution: A Unified and Standards-Led Approach

To resolve the issue, Ticketsolve carried out a detailed audit of the GA4 and Google Tag Manager setup across both domains. The goal was to ensure consent choices were recognised consistently throughout the user journey.

The first step was to standardise the Consent Management Platform. By implementing Cookiebot across both the Canterbury Festival website and the Ticketsolve booking subdomain, user consent could flow seamlessly from discovery through to purchase. This also removed the need for duplicate consent banners, improving the overall customer experience.

Alongside this, Advanced Consent Mode within Google Tag Manager was reconfigured. Previously, misaligned settings caused GA4 to register purchases as cookieless pings even when consent had been granted. Correcting this ensured that GA4 received accurate consent states and could record transactions properly.

The Results: Accurate Reporting and Clear Insight

The impact of these changes was both immediate and measurable.

The gap between Ticketsolve’s recorded revenue and GA4 reporting reduced dramatically, from 76% to just over 10%. Transaction discrepancies were also significantly reduced. More importantly, GA4 could now reliably track user sessions, purchases, and conversion paths across the full journey.

With confidence restored in their analytics, Canterbury Festival gained a clearer understanding of audience behaviour and campaign performance. This allowed the team to make informed decisions based on insight they could trust.

Misconfigurations in Google Tag Manager meant purchases were tracked with “cookieless pings,” even after consent. A full audit and reconfiguration ensured GA4 captured the right data.

Consent carried across domains automatically
Smoother customer experience without repeated prompts
Accurate, complete data for GA4 reporting

With their GA4 tracking issues resolved, Canterbury Festival can now use analytics as it was intended: as a dependable foundation for understanding audiences and measuring success.

This project demonstrates that reliable insight isn’t just about tools: it’s about consistency, governance, and thoughtful configuration. With those foundations in place, Canterbury Festival is well positioned to plan future activity with clarity and confidence.

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