Consent Mode: Google’s new solution to continue measuring conversions while respecting the consent rules
The need to ask the user for express consent before installing cookies on their browser may lead to the loss of conversion measurement for those users who reject this consent. Google, with its new “Consent Mode” functionality, seeks to mitigate this impact. Therefore, it is important that we know how it works. Consent Mode focuses on two types of consent; analytics and advertising personalization. Introducing two new variables, ad_storage and analytics_storage in the configuration, allows you to inform your tags (Google Analytics, GMP and Google Ads) of the status of the user’s consent, adjusting their behavior accordingly. It should be clarified that Consent Mode is not a CMP (Consent Management Platform), but complements the system or solution that is installed to collect the consent of the users. The tags will always be executed, regardless of whether you have the consent of the user or not. The real change comes in the information they collect: If the user has given their consent, the tag will be executed normally, while if they have rejected it, the tag will be executed without collecting or sending cookie information. In this way, it is possible to continue having a basic and aggregated measurement instead of completely losing this information. With the information collected from users who have accepted consent, Google platforms will also be able to model conversions for those users who have not accepted it. Currently, this modeling is not active but it is planned in your roadmap. An additional functionality that can be activated with Consent Mode is the so-called “URL Passthrough”. This option will allow you to send the identifier of the click in the url to be able to continue associating it with a conversion in the absence of cookies. The implementation requires that you are using GTM or gtag, and consists of the inclusion of some lines of code for the configuration. If you want more information on this specific topic, do not hesitate to contact us. On the other hand, to facilitate the process, some CMPs (Consent Management Platforms) such as Cookiebot or OneTrust, among others, already have direct integration developed and facilitate activation. To end this article and summarizing the previous points:
- Consent Mode arises from the need to comply with the user’s consent without completely losing the measurement. Such a basic and necessary element to allow us to analyze, improve and optimize the activation of advertising.
- It is currently a beta tool that continues to be developed and will progressively include more features and options, such as the conversion modeling mentioned above.
If you want to know more about Consent Mode, don’t hesitate to contact Making Science and our experts.
Cookies configuration