It is simple, they allow the site visitor to refuse the use of analytical and marketing cookies, thus blocking the website owner from obtaining the personal data and site data they need to make it economical to use.
Without the consent of the site visitor, the website owner has no idea how many times their site was visited, what pages the user looked at and what interested them. The site owner cannot direct any marketing to the user to increase sales of their products.
So, you can fully understand why such an objection is raised. The perfect banner for a website owner who relies on analytics and marketing cookies is the one that informs the user that cookies are being used, with an ‘OK’ button, so giving no real control to the user.
Unfortunately for these websites and marketing departments this approach is fast becoming too risky. Website owners are at an increasing risk of being investigated for any data protection or ePrivacy violations. The recent fines against Google and Amazon by the French Data Protection Authorities only show how vulnerable website owners are if they take this risk-based approach.
So, what is the answer?
Website owners can be totally compliant with the requirements of the GDPR and ePrivacy and get the important analytical and marketing data they need. CookieScan can easily be integrated with Google Consent Mode, allowing CookieScan to recognise when consent for these two categories of cookie is given or not.
If consent is given, the website owner obtains all the data they need from the user as normal. When consent is declined, rather than a total block being put up against this data collection, Google Consent Made deploys two cookies,
- analytics_storage
- ad_storage
analytics_storage
With the “analytics_storage” tag setting, Google Consent Mode controls the behaviour of analytics cookies on your website based on the consent state of your end-users – making Google Analytics adjust its data collection based on the granular consent choice of each, individual user.
If users do not give consent to analytics cookies, your website will still receive aggregate and non-identifying basic measurements and modelling data such as –
- Timestamps of visits to your website
- User agent, i.e., whether users landed on your website
- Referrer, i.e., how the user landed on your website
- Whether current or prior page in user’s navigation includes ad-click information in the URL
- Random number per each page load
ad_storage
With the “ad_storage” tag setting, Google Consent Mode controls the behaviour of marketing cookies on your website based on the consent state of your end-users, e.g., if a user does not consent to marketing cookies, Google Consent Mode will ensure that all marketing-related Google cookies will adjust and not use cookies.
Your website will be able to show contextual advertisement based on anonymous data instead of targeted advertisement based on tracking of personal data if users do not give consent to marketing cookies.
Google Consent Mode will enable your website to measure conversions related to a specific campaign on an aggregate level rather than on an individual user-level – making sure that you get insights into the performance of your website’s marketing in a fully GDPR and ePrivacy compliant way without the use of personal data.
Start using CookieScan and be totally compliant
Additionally, Google Consent Mode allows Google cookies to change behaviour if a user later changes their consent state and to configure Google cookies behaviours to specific regions, e.g. automatically ensuring that no cookies are activated without consent for users inside the EU, while using cookies for users in the US.
So, you can now see that the gap between GDPR and ePrivacy compliance and Marketing is being bridged, allowing some very important data through when that dreaded slider is let on ‘OFF’ for analytical and marketing cookies.
CookieScan is your total compliance solution for your website, try it for free today and start your 30-day free trial.