Not for many years. The only way to get Google search term data now is through the Search Console product, which integrates with GA.

Nope. They forward through an in-between that obscures it. They argue that because search results are personalized, being able to see the search terms can give you information about the visitor that can compromise their privacy. Google doesn't want anybody violating user privacy except for Google.

> Don't you still have to provide a cookie banner as soon as your analytics are storing cookies, even if it's your own?

You need consent for every kind of storage usage on client side if you create profiles to analyze the them for marketing goals. If not, and no PII is being processed, no consent is required. Eg you could easily aggregate your server logs without a consent.

> How are you tracking returning users without cookies?

We're not. And that's exactly the point, because we don't want to track. I make a distinction between tracking, analyzing and stats. What we do is guess who are the unique visitors (and who are not), and I say guess because it's guesswork since the browser can spew out any kind of info.

> Also if it’s multi-lingual, how are you storing the language prefs?

Cookies you require for functionality (ie. login cookies, language settings) require no consent, but do require to be laid out in a cookie policy.

Why would you need that? All businsess that aren't online can't collect that data and we still have newspapers and supermarkets. If you are interested in that data just ask your users.

You can send campaign data that way, but to run any kind of effective campaign on Google Ads, you also need to send conversion data back if the user who clicks on your ad actually does the thing you want. You can either use GA or Google Ads own tracking option to set a cookie with a unique ID associated with that ad click and then send that to Google when they convert.

A privacy-conscious serverside GTM/GA implementation won't leak any personal data like IP address to Google, but there's no way to avoid sending the GCLID if you advertise.

A lot of companies are dependent on Google Ads for demand generation, so it's the reason they are sticking with GA even as the writing's on the wall.

Processing of personal information is unlawful except in the conditions listed in the article.

So "exceptional" in the sense that they are exceptions to a more general rule, as of opposed to the sense of being extraordinary.

Plausible et al all are a pale imitation of GA. They all offer a dashboard with some basic filtering. But they offer little in the way of true analytics features, that allow you to slice, dice, and compare data.