Google Consent Mode is Coming

Google Consent Mode is a feature that allows you to communicate your users’ cookie or app identifier consent status to Google. It interacts with your Consent Management Platform (CMP) or custom implementation for obtaining visitor consent, such as a cookie consent banner. Consent mode receives your users’ consent choices from your cookie banner or widget and dynamically adapts the behaviour of Analytics, Ads, and third-party tags that create or read cookies.

What happens next?

When visitors deny consent, instead of storing cookies, tags send pings to Google. If you are using Google Analytics 4, Google fills the data collection gaps with conversion modelling and behavioural modelling. Google tags for products like Google Analytics, Google Ads, Floodlight, and Conversion Linker contain built-in consent checks and adjust behaviour based on consent state.

But Why?

Google Consent Mode is a new way to ensure a website’s use of cookies and visitor data is compliant with GDPR and other data privacy regulations. It configures the Google tags and scripts on a third-party website to modify how they use each visitor’s data, based on the visitor’s consent status. It can enable a website to treat certain users’ data anonymously while processing other users’ data as normal.

The advantage of using Google Consent mode is that it uses conversion modelling to understand user behaviour and website performance even when consent isn’t given. It is used to estimate the actions users take on your site, which might otherwise be lost due to their consent preferences. This fills in conversion gaps and ensures that your data and insights remain comprehensive and accurate, helping you make informed decisions based on user interactions with your website.

Consent Mode adjusts how Google tags including Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, Google Marketing Platform, and Google Ads behave based on the consent status of the users. In light of regulatory changes and increased demand for the protection of users’ privacy and consent choices, Google is now updating Consent Mode to Consent Mode v2. The main difference is the introduction of two additional consent states: “ad_user_data” and “ad_personalization”, which can be attributed to a user’s consent.

The most important benefit to using Consent Mode is that it helps you adhere to privacy regulations, including GDPR, while still being able to track whatever data remains available to you on platforms like Google Analytics and Google Ads. Using Google’s Consent Mode meets privacy/GDPR compliance whilst still allowing some data to flow into your Analytics and Google Ads, rather than cutting it off almost completely which is what we are seeing with basic cookie control plugins, as it uses cookieless pings instead, which transmit non-identifiable data.

This is a big change to how data is collected and shared online, on initial inspection, this can be considered a positive, despite the additional work business we be required to complete. The holes is our web data should be filled but will this drive anything more than assumptive metrics? Only time will tell.

If you need to talk through Google Consent Mode, get in touch and see what effects this might have on your business.