Google recently announced that the Consent
Mode version 2 is becoming mandatory to build in with your Consent Management
platform if you want to utilize the advertising features of the
Google products out there. So today I thought I'll show you how you
can build in the Consent Mode, and we'll do this with the help of the tool
Cookiebot and Google Tag Manager. So let's get started. So here I'm on the website of Cookiebot
already, and this is one of the many tools that you could choose if you wanted to
have a consent management platform that has the built-in features of the Google
Consent Mode being built in already. So this is a free tool to use. You also have a generous free
plan if you choose so as well. So I have signed up here, and this is my dashboard where I have put in, first of
all, my domain, and I configured already my little consent pop-up that I
want to have on the website itself. And I added some cookies here and
trackers that are running on my website. I did this manually because my website is
under a login, and so it's not possible to get my website scanned, but normally you
would scan the website itself, so it picks up the cookies and the
trackers automatically. So then on my website itself, I have Google Tag Manager already installed, and
Currently, I have some tags here that I want to put under the Consent Management
platform and under Consent Mode. We have the GA4 tag, we have the conversion linker, the Google
Ads tag, and then MetaPixel. You see, we don't have any Cookie Consent set up right now or a
Consent banner as a whole. So let's change that
and install Cookiebot. The cool thing about Cookiebot is that they have their own custom tag
template, so we can install them. Let's go over to the tags here and go to Tag Configuration, and then we'll
enter the Community Template gallery. And here we are going
to look for Cookiebot. And here we go, the Cookiebot-CMP. Let's add this to our workspace and take a
look at the different configurations here. We need the Cookiebot ID, which we can
get in the implementation part here. And this is the ID that we will need. So let me copy that, put that in here. And then there are some configurations as
well as enabling the Google Consent Mode. And this will connect our Consent banner
with the right calls to Google Tag Manager, to the data layer, to the GETag
that uses the Consent Management API. So we have all the right calls
all automatically in there. All we need to do once we have the Google Consent Mode enabled, we need to also
choose our default consent state. So what should our state be once the
consent popup loads before any tag fire? You can decide this on region, but if you
leave the region empty, it will be globally applied, and I will keep
everything on denied and add this here. So this will be our default. Let's give this all a name
and then add a trigger. And for the trigger, we'll utilize the
consent initialization all pages trigger because we want to fire this first
before any of our other tags fire. So let's choose that and save. I'll go to Preview,
put in the domain, and let's connect. And here we go. We get our consent popup where we can choose the different categories
and click allow or deny and so on. We'll click allow now. Let's take a look in the
tag assistant at this stage. In our tag assistant, we can see
a lot of different calls now. We have here calls about consent, and
these are the consent calls that are being made to the GETag with
the consent mode API. Here we can see the different categories, add storage, add user, add
personalization, and so on. By default, they're all denied. We are also seeing the new categories already being added from
consent mode version 2. We have add storage and add user data
now, and these are also denied by default. And then once I made a decision, we see
under here consent, we have an update here and everything is granted because that's
what I chose as the option in my consent. And on this call, there are no tags firing because all of the tags are
initially still on container loaded. So here we have our GETag firing, google ads, conversion link in meta pixel, which
shows us our tags are not yet connected to the consent management platform or to any
of the consent choices that I have made. So we need to put them under this. And if you are using the consent mode, you already have these calls in there, you can
actually connect Google Tag Manager to these calls as well with
the consent overview. So what you can do inside of Google Tag
Manager is go to Admin here, and then we can go to Consent settings
and choose the consent overview. And now we can utilize specific triggers that are new triggers and
add them to the tags itself. So you get this little button right here
where you see which tags already have the new configuration of the consent
overview applied to them. And we don't have any
of these applied yet. So all of our tags don't have that secondary trigger that would
determine whether it can fire or not. Now, what you see here as well is
And this is the built-in consent. And this is actually the altering of
the functionality of the actual tags. So if you have any built-in consent, then
if the consent add storage and analytics storage is denied, for the Google
Analytics For tag, it will still be able to send these cookie-less pings that would
be part of the advanced consent mode. But more about this later. Let's go first into the basic mode of blocking actually our tags
if there's no consent given. For that, we'll need to
add an additional consent. So for example, for this GA4 tag, you can
go into the tag itself and scroll down. And all of these have the setting now, the
consent settings, where you can choose which additional consent
needs to be required. And there are different categories, the categories that you saw already
in the tag assistant here. So these are the categories, and we can add them to our require
additional consent. This is like a secondary part of triggers, and we can put in here analytics storage,
for example, for Google Analytics 4. So you can do this for every tag or go into this consent overview by clicking
on this little shield icon here. And then you can choose which ones you
want to put under the certain scope. So for example, the meta pixel
should be under advertising. So I'm going to add this here in this
consent overview require additional consent, and we'll put
the add storage in here. And then also, let's put the conversion
linker into these categories as well. And let's save this. And so now we have consent
consent configured for these tags. You don't need to do it for Cookiebot because that needs to fire anyways in
order to ask for consent from the user. Now, one thing that we need to take care of as well is the trigger itself because
this fires on the all pages trigger, and the all pages trigger is not sufficient
because it would be on container loaded where we might not yet have a
consent decision from the user. So we'll need to utilize a event that Cookiebot puts out with the consent
mode, which is the cookie consent update. This update call actually happens even If
I already made a choice, so I'm going to go to the next website here,
I will still get the Cookie Consent Update, and that's an event that files
into the data layer every page view. Also, when I change my consent,
so let's go ahead and change the consent around here, we should have a new
cookie consent update right here. So this happens every time the consent
changes, and that's what I want to use as a new custom trigger
that will fire my event. So I'm going to copy
this little part here. This is the event name, and let's go into the triggers and go ahead and create
a new trigger for a custom event. And this is my cookie consent update. So this is a custom trigger,
cookie consent update. And apply this everywhere where we have
currently the all pages trigger installed. So I'm going to go through this menu
right here and add our new cookie consent. And here we go. We have changed this around. And now Let's test this
out and preview this. All right, we get to the page and let's go ahead and delete our cookie so
we get our little dialog back. I'm going to go to the application and then under my cookies right here,
going to search for consent. And here is the cookie bot consent. Let's get rid of that and reload the page. And let's say we only want
to allow marketing for now. So allow selection. And let's see what happens
in the tag assistant. We have our cookie consent consent update and our tag's Remarketing Conversion
Linker in MetaPixel file, but not GA4 tag. So if you click on that, you see it didn't fire due to missing consent, although
it was the right firing trigger. So we have two kinds of triggers
now attached to the tag. One is the actual trigger that determines whether it fires or not in
which given circumstances. And then we have additional consent that didn't fire because we didn't have
the analytics storage consent. You can also always look into this new tab called Consent right here, where you
can see the different consent statuses. So the current consent status is that add storage, add user, and add
personalizations are granted. But analytics storage, functionality, and personalization storage have been denied,
and security storage is granted itself. So with that, we have put our tags now under the control of the user of giving
that consent or withdrawing that consent with the second triggers that you would
put under the additional required consent. But how do you know now that this
new consent mode is actually working? Consent mode itself is simply away from
the GETag to communicate to your tags how they function and what data
they actually send over. You can control if this actually is happening by looking
in the network request. If you go back to our website here and open up the developer tools, which you can
do here under the three dots, and then under more tools, you'll
find your developer tools. And you can go over to the Network Requests and then look for
your Google Analytics request. I need to reload the page here, and
there are There's a lot of requests here. You can filter them by putting in your
Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics ID. So our G minus, for example,
will give you all the requests. Oh, yeah, it didn't fire because we
didn't fire Google Analytics for. What we're going to do is change the
consent now and allow everything. And let's see under the
Network tab now, it's reload. You should see an additional request,
which is our collect request. And this is actually the request
that goes over to Google Analytics. And here, in order to have the consent mode correctly installed,
you should a parameter. And this parameter is GCS. And then for the new
consent mode, also ghcid. And here you see some parameters
that have been attached to this. This is how you know that the consent mode is actually sending data over and the
consent status is sent over to the mother server of Google Analytics,
Google Ads, and so on. So you need to look at the network request
to see if this is actually working or not. If you don't see the ghcid or GCS, then you don't have consent
mode correctly installed. And there's There's no signal, no flag sending over to Google Analytics
or to Google Ads, for example. And what we have done here is the basic mode of the consent mode of
the Google products right here. So if the user gives consent, the tag's fire and this extra flag is
added to the request itself. But if you wanted to utilize the advanced
mode of the consent mode, so sending data over in a special way, even if there's no
consent available or if consent has been denied, then you would need to
change around your setup slightly. How would you do Well, the consent mode itself would not need to block the
tags once the user denies the consent. So we essentially get rid of our consent
settings for these different tags. So on the conversion linker, GA tag and remark marketing right here, we would
remove our additional consent checks. Let me go into the right menu. So this is the menu right here. And we would remove the ones for GA4,
for Google Ads and conversion linker. And we only do this for the Google tags because the other tags are obviously
not governed by the consent mode at all. So meta pixel doesn't have that extra request going out as this consent
mode is really just a Google thing. So let's go ahead and onset
the additional consent here. And here we go. We would now have our tags governed by the built-in consent that is
already governing these tags. If add storage is denied, you would have cookie-less pings that
are being sent over. So this is the advanced
mode implementation. I would warn you of using this one. It needs to be in adherence with your privacy policy and your standards of
how you want to implement your consent. Now, Google says that it will give you extra modeling capabilities
in their tools. Nonetheless, you are skipping the consent of the user itself, which I don't think is
a really good idea here, but that's up to everybody's own interpretation of
how you should be implementing this. So right now we can see if the user says, okay, Okay, let's deny this
whole tracking thing right here. So this is now denied. We'll open up the developer tools
again and the network request. Let's reload our page. So now everything should be denied. We see this here under consent update. Everything here is denied. Nonetheless, on this event here, our GA4
tag fires, our Google Ads tag files, conversion linker files, we are still
tracking data, but in a different way. And we can see here in the collect
calls that this is a non-consented hit. You need to decode what is
in the request right here. But this would mean that
everything is denied. Please only send these quickly list
pings over to Google Analytics. And this would be the advanced mode
implementation of the consent mode itself. Now, however you want to do it at the end
of this deployment, you obviously need to go ahead and test this thoroughly to see
whether your different settings are adhering to the different consent
that the user has given you. And then once you're ready, submit this as
a version, put in a name, and then you're ready to go and have your with
consent mode on your website. If you want to see more Google Tag Manager
tutorials, we have tons of them over here. My name is Julian.
Till next time.
