New regulations are pushing experts in the digital ecosystem to comply with the RGPD. With Apple’s IOS 14 update and the end of cookies scheduled for 2022, Google has launched Consent Mode to help advertisers still track the performance of their campaigns, while respecting users’ private data.
In this article, our experts explain the concept of Consent Mode and how to integrate it into your Google Ads campaigns.
What is Consent Mode?
Consent Mode is a beta feature designed to help advertisers take a privacy-first approach to digital marketing. When a user does not consent to the use of advertising or analytics cookies, Consent Mode automatically adjusts the behavior of relevant Google tags so that they do not read or write cookies for advertising or analytics purposes. This allows marketers to respect the user’s choice while helping them gain insights for their campaigns. In summary, Consent Mode is designed to ensure that useful data is collected to measure the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns, even if your users have not given their consent to cookies.
Google services that support consent mode are the following:
- Google Analytics
- Google Ads (Google Ads Conversion Tracking and Retargeting)
- Floodlight
- Conversion Linker
Read also :
→ Google Ads Insights Diagnostic
The benefits of using Consent Mode
With Consent Mode, advertisers can better understand their campaign conversion data while ensuring that the Google tags that help them measure conversions respect users’ choice of ad cookies. Since you can keep conversion metrics in your campaign reports, you can also continue to attribute conversions to the right campaign and effectively optimize your campaign bids. You will also be able to retrieve up to almost 70% of the data needed to manage your ad campaigns through Google Tools.
How does Consent Mode work?
Google’s Consent Mode uses two new tags to adjust the behavior of Google’s cookies and tags:
- ad_storage for Google Ads
- analytics_storage for Google Analytics
Consent Mode receives information from these tags about the state of consent to cookies of your visitors. Based on this data, Google’s Consent Mode adapts its operation according to your user’s choice:
- If the use of cookies is accepted by the visitor, the tracking tags work normally. The Google Ads and Google Analytics cookies are therefore activated to track user behavior and generate the data.
- In case the user refuses or changes cookies settings, the consent mode uses “pings” to generate the different performance data.
These pings can include the following events:
- Pings about the user’s consent status.
- Conversion pings: These are sent to indicate that a conversion has taken place.
- Google Analytics pings: sent on every page of a website where Google Analytics is implemented and when events are logged.
Once the pings are sent, even if users refuse the cookies, you will still be able to track conversions from your various advertising campaigns via Google products and your website traffic via Google Analytics. However, you won’t get detailed data about your visitors that could be re-used for retargeting campaigns and personalized ads.
Read also : → Best four effective strategies to target your audience with Google Ads
How to implement Consent Mode?
To use Google’s Consent Mode, the website must have a CMP (Consent Management Platform), that ensures that user consent is collected correctly while complying with GDPR.
By linking the Consent Mode API to the CMP, advertisers will be able to clearly indicate whether or not the user has given consent to the use of statistical measurement and tracking cookies. Google tags will respect this choice and adjust their behavior accordingly. They will only use cookies if consent has been granted.
The Google Consent Mode is therefore the link between the CMP used on the website and Google. It is the interface that allows Google to tailor its services based on the user’s consent, without Google having direct access to personal data.
If you wish to know more about the implementation of the Consent Mode or need to put it in place, contact EMINENCE.
Contact us: https://eminence.ch/en/contact-us/
