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The added value and importance of the Google Consent Mode

With the entry of GDPR legislation in 2016, it is mandatory to ask visitors for consent in advance. This article explains how the Google consent mode helps with this, how to implement it and what it does. So that after this article you can get started yourself and ask website users for consent in compliance with GDPR legislation.

What is consent mode?

The consent mode allows you to communicate users’ issued consent to Google. It interfaces with your Consent Management Platform (CMP), for example Cookiebot. Based on the issued consent, it automatically regulates the placement of cookies. This includes whether or not to place 3rd party cookies, such as ad cookies from Google Ads or Facebook Ads. In addition to determining the placement of cookies, Consent Mode also populates data from visitors who do not provide consent. Google does this using conversion and behavior modeling in Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads. Within the tagging and Google advertising approach of PureDigital we advise and implement the consent mode by default. In order to measure as much as possible in a privacy-friendly way.

How to implement consent mode?

The consent mode can be implemented via Google Tag Manager. Per tag set, the following consent setting can be provided:

Ad_storage: allows cookies related to advertising, such as the Google Ads pixel.

Analytics_storage: Enables cookies related to analyzing website behavior, such as Google Analytics 4.

Functionality_storage: enables cookies that allow the website to function, such as the language setting based on your browser.

Personalization_storage: allows cookies that track website behavior to personalize, Such as video recommandations.

Security_storage: enables cookies needed for website security.

It is important to provide the correct consent setting for each tag in a container. Rather have this done by someone who works with this on a daily basis? Contact one of our specialists quickly!

How do you control what it does?

Assessing whether consent mode is working can be done via a preview from Google Tag Manager. Before this preview, make sure you delete all cookies and then see which tags go off based on the consent you give as a user. Do you see tags going off even though you did not give consent for them? Then something is not right in Google Tag Manager or the integration with the CMP.

In addition to how consent-based triggering works, it is also important to consider whether consent mode also completes data from users who do not give consent. Here it is important to note that there are some minimum requirements before this is applied, namely:

  1. Consent mode is enabled for all pages of your website and/or all screens of your app.
  2. Consent mode should be implemented so that all tags are loaded before the cookie wall appears.
  3. The Google Analytics 4 property collects at least 1,000 events per day from users who do not accept cookies for at least 7 days.
  4. The Google Analytics 4 property has at least 1000 daily users who do accept cookies. For at least 7 of the last 28 days.

Only then does the machine learning model have enough data to make an accurate prediction. Then, after some additional settings in Google Analytics 4, you may encounter the following message in reports:

If this is the case then you know that modeling is successfully used in both Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads.

Conclusion

Continuing to measure Web site activity in a privacy-friendly way is crucial to making good online marketing decisions. This article shows that consent mode is a suitable solution for this. As a result, you can perfectly measure the behavior of visitors on your website in a privacy-friendly way. Also want to use consent mode? If so, please be sure to contact us!