Consent Mode is a way to ensure you’re respecting users’ choices pertaining to their personal data and communicating them to Google.
Marketers have long known the value of data and now customers have come to understand it too. As a result, regulations have been put in place to ensure businesses are using and protecting data in an appropriate manner.
This means new ways of working to make sure the use of cookies and visitor data is compliant. Implementing Google Consent Mode on a website is one way of staying on the right side of GDPR and other data privacy regulations.
Consent Mode distinguishes between users who have agreed to have their data processed and those who haven’t, customising Google tags to modify their information accordingly. Consisting of two settings, Consent Mode enables websites to utilise the different types of data in disparate ways, simultaneously.
While users who’ve consented to cookies will have their data processed as normal, those who’ve declined will be treated anonymously. Google tags are an integral part of many websites and allow platforms like Google Analytics and Google Ads to track visitor interactions and other metrics.
For many years, Google tags went unchallenged, forming the foundation for a lot of the infrastructure that powered digital marketing, but there’s been a shift in recent years. Regulators and browsers are more vigilant about technologies that potentially breach users’ privacy.
This has led to the need to find solutions that enable brands to use data in marketing while at the same time respecting users’ preferences. Developing tech that can differentiate between consent statuses and handle data accordingly is good for both users and brands, who can protect themselves by ensuring they’re GDPR-compliant while continuing to carry out their operations.
Consent Mode is one such solution to this challenge, enabling organisations to use data-driven marketing tactics like web analytics, personalisation and ad retargeting ethically. So far, Consent Mode is compatible with tags and scripts on five of Google’s platforms:
One area where Consent Mode is proving particularly useful is Google Ads. Depending on users’ choices, the ad_storage and analytics_storage tags will control advertising behaviour and adjust the conversion measurements accordingly.
This is significant as it allows Google Ads to make use of conversion modelling. In a privacy-first approach to marketing, data can be lost, but Consent Mode is able to mitigate this side effect in a compliant, anonymous manner.
In fact, Google claims that conversion modelling through Consent Mode recovers more than 70 per cent of of ad-click-to-conversion journeys that would otherwise be lost due to user cookie consent choices on average. It’s a viable way to get a fuller picture of user behaviour without breaching privacy, thus powering data-driven marketing decisions.
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