What Is Consent Mode?

Today I want to remove some of the mystery around Consent Mode and Consent Mode V2.

So what is consent mode?

The terms "Consent Mode" and "Consent Mode v2" can seem daunting but really, they are just the next step towards a more privacy-focused internet.

Consent Mode allows the users of your website to let you know if they are happy for you to use their data to do things like track their usage of your site, provide additional functionality like remembering what they had in their cart on their last visit or to target them with ads.

How Does Consent Mode Work?

By now, I think you will have seen the consent banners that pop up on pretty much every website asking you to accept cookies or manage your consent settings etc.

If you're using a good platform for that banner like CookiePro or CookieYes, it will be able to communicate with Google Tag Manager and tell it what choices were made by the user of your site.

You can then use that information to let Tag Manager know which tags should be firing and which ones shouldn't be.

So for example, if someone accepts performance cookies but not targeting cookies, we will tell Google Tag Manager to fire the Google Analytics tags but not to fire any tags relating to targeting users for advertising purposes like Google Ads.

What Is The Difference Between Consent Mode & Consent Mode V2?

There's actually very little difference between Consent Mode and Consent Mode V2.

The first version of Consent Mode had two consent states to determine how data is collected.

Analytics_storage, which asks the user to consent to their data being used for analytics and, ad_storage, which asks the user to consent to their data being used for advertising.

Consent Mode V2 keeps both of those consent states but adds another two into the mix.

Ad_user_data, which asks if it's okay to send personal data to Google.

And, ad_personalization, which asks if it's okay to send personal data to Google in order to remarket to the user using Google Ads.

Do You Need To Implement Consent Mode V2?

If you want to keep using Google Ads and GA4 after March of 2024, then yes you do.

If you use an approved platform like CookiePro or CookieYes and have a decent grasp of Google Tag Manager then you should be able to do it yourself, otherwise, I would advise hiring a professional to do it for you.

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Written by Christian Donovan, Director of Performance Marketing at 3B1.