What is Google Consent Mode?
A look at Google Consent Mode and what it means for your marketing.
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By now, if you have been following any news about GA4 or Google Ads, you’ve probably heard of Consent Mode.
According to Google, “Consent Mode lets you communicate your users’ cookie or app identifier consent status to Google. Tags adjust their behaviour and respect users’ choices.”
In plain English, if a user consents to being tracked, you can track them with Google Tags. If not, then you can’t. This works in combination with your cookie management platform. So that when a user sets their consent preferences, Google Tags will be updated accordingly.
But as a marketer, doesn’t that mean you’ll lose loads of data? Well yes, but also no.
This is why Advanced Consent Mode exists. It uses pings and a bunch of built-in modelling to provide an advertiser-specific model. Google says that Advanced Consent Mode is GDPR compliant, but some are unsure whether this is accurate. For those not wishing to risk it until more clarity is provided, Basic Consent Mode can be used. Basic Consent Mode means that the pings and modelling used by Advanced Consent Mode are not available. So if a user doesn’t provide consent, no data will be received. Conversion modelling in Ad will be based on a general model.
Consent Mode has had to be introduced because there are a lot of data privacy laws being introduced around the world. We all know about GDPR (I hope!), but there are also newer laws like the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act).
About one-third of users currently do not consent to being tracked (that’s a lot of data that just doesn’t exist anymore).
Well, if consent is granted, everything exists as normal. Users are tracked, and you know what pages they visited, what they bought, and what they interacted with.
If consent is not granted, there are no cookies stored so you do lose the data.
With Advanced Consent Mode, you thankfully don’t lose everything if a user doesn’t grant consent.
Google still communicates a very minimal amount of information about those users.
It communicates:
Consent Mode allows you to customise how Google tags behave before and after user consent decisions, via Google Tag (gtag) or via Google Tag Manager (GTM).
I did. There are quite a few of these (and this may well turn into another blog entirely), but there are:
Great…what?
Basically, when consent is granted, all the tags implemented work as expected. If consent isn’t granted, then the tags adjust accordingly.
According to Google’s documentation (you can find that here) Consent Mode pings can include:
Functional information (such as headers added passively by the browser):
Aggregate or non-identifying information:
All of this is to say that if consent is denied, instead of cookies being stored, your tags send pings to Google.
If you are using GA4 (which if you are reading this blog you probably are), Analytics fills any data gaps with modelling (both conversion and behavioural).
If you use Google Analytics or Google Ads, not implementing Consent Mode will mean a loss of data and of certain advertising features:
“To keep using measurement, ad personalization, and remarketing features, you must collect consent for use of personal data from end users based in the EEA and share consent signals with Google. The requirements also apply if you are using Google Analytics data with a Google service.”
Google
If you use Google Ads and your site doesn’t collect user consent, you may being to see the following warning notice:
There are a few things to keep in mind when deploying and setting up Consent Mode that are worth remembering (and getting correct from inception).
For Advanced Consent Mode, best practices remain the same, but with a slight change.
Whilst there may be some initial setup and testing to ensure that Consent Mode is behaving correctly, implementing Consent Mode doesn’t necessarily mean completely changing your current user consent setup.
Many of the existing cookie and privacy consent management tools (CMPs) and plugins are Consent Mode compatible. They may just need a tweak in settings and potentially the addition of an extra line of code or two to your website, and some updates to tags in Tag Manager.
Google have a list of some of the compatible consent management platforms available here. This includes popular solutions like Cookiebot which we have implemented for some of our clients.
Other large platforms, such as Cookie Control from Civic, have added information to their websites about implementation. This is another CMP that we have experience implementing for our clients and on our own website.
If you don’t have a cookie consent banner on your website, or if your current consent solution doesn’t collect explicit consent, or isn’t compatible, then it is time to implement one that is. The deadline for Consent Mode readiness is March 2024.
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