What is Consent Mode?

Google Consent Mode is a new API designed to provide more flexibility in how Google products can be used in conjunction with your cookie consent management platform. Consent Mode can be used to customise how Google products behave before and after visitors to your website make their consent choices. This allows you to measure conversions more effectively, while respecting your users' permission choices for advertising and analytics cookies.

In effect, this means you can maintain conversion metrics while your tags behave in a permission-aware manner.

*The Consent Mode is not a way to "bypass" cookies: the API wants to respect the end user's consent and offer alternative methods of measurement.

So how does it work?

Google Consent Mode uses two new tags (ad_storage and analytics_storage) to control the behaviour of Google tags and cookies. The Consent Mode receives information about the consent status of your users directly from the Cookie Information Consent Pop-up.

Based on your user's decision whether or not to consent to cookies, Google Consent Mode basically works on two separate strings:

If the user gives permission, the associated tags function normally and you can use Google Ads and Google Analytics 4 cookies for measurement and retargeting (business as usual).

If the user does not give permission, the permission mode uses pings to communicate that events have occurred.

Events for which pings are used are:

• Consent status: Pings are sent from each page that a user visits (this includes whether the consent given by the user has changed) for each cookie category.
• Conversions: When a conversion occurs, pings are sent to inform Google Analytics 4 of the conversion.
• Google Analytics 4: Pings are sent on the pages where Google Analytics 4 is present - to measure all visits and events.

While you may miss out on the ability to get detailed data about your visitors as you used to for retargeting campaigns and personalised advertising, you will still be able to measure conversions from Ads campaigns and website traffic. Consent Mode ensures that campaigns can still be transparent and measurable.

Google's platforms

Attributing conversions to the campaign that caused them is an important priority for advertisers. This allows them to better optimise campaign bids and allocate budget to the best performing campaigns. With Consent Mode, advertisers can gain greater insight into conversion data while ensuring that the Google tags that help them measure conversions reflect users' consent choices for ad cookies.

Once the consent mode is implemented, advertisers will have access to a new tag setting, "ad_storage", which controls cookie behaviour for advertising purposes, including measuring conversions. If a user does not consent to ad cookies, Google tags will not use cookies for advertising purposes.

Suppose someone visits your website and gives permission for ad cookies to be used on your cookie consent banner. With permission mode, your Google tags can determine whether or not permission was given for your site to use cookies for advertising purposes for that user. If a user gives consent, conversion measurement reporting continues normally. If a user does not give consent, the relevant Google tags will adapt and not use advertising cookies, but conversions will be measured on a more aggregate level.

Consent Mode allows you to update the behaviour of Google tags based on the user's consent choice.

Consent Mode allows campaigns run through Google Ads, Campaign Manager, Display & Video 360 and Search Ads 360 continue to report conversions while respecting users' consent choices for ad cookies. Your SEA campaigns remain transparent. Because you can keep conversion metrics in your campaign reporting, you can continue to assign conversions to the right campaign and optimize your campaign bids efficiently.

Google Analytics 4

Consent mode also works with Google Analytics 4. This means that Analytics will be able to understand and respect user consent for ad cookies. For example, when the "ad_storage" tag setting is disabled for users without consent, Analytics will not read or write ad cookies, meaning that optional features that rely on Google signals, such as remarketing, will be disabled.

In addition to the "ad_storage" tag setting, Consent Mode offers advertisers a new tag setting, "analytics_storage," which controls the use of analytics cookies. Suppose you want to ask your website users for permission to use both analytics and advertising cookies. You can use the permission mode to update the behaviour of Google tags based on the user's choice for each type of cookie.

Analytics will adjust data collection based on user consent for each of the "ad_storage" and "analytics_storage" settings. For example, if a user does not consent to ad cookies (and thus disables ad serving) but does consent to analytics cookies, advertisers will still be able to measure site behaviour and conversions in Analytics because the "analytics_storage" setting will be enabled.

There is no doubt that the future will be completely cookie-free and that this will bring a major change in the online marketing era. But thanks to Google's Consent Mode and Facebook's Conversion API, there are still opportunities to keep your campaigns transparent and measurable, even without cookies.

Need advice or help with Consent Mode implementation? We are here for you!