Google Consent Mode for Google Analytics and Google Ads

Google Consent Mode and GDPR

Under the GDPR framework, users must be informed about tracking and asked for permission BEFORE you can start to track them. This means that if a visitor lands on your site for the first time, tracking is blocked until they give you their permission. 

If you use PixelYourSite to fire the Google tags, and ConsentMagic to manage users’ consent, and you decide to use Google Consnet Mode, the tags are not blocked anymore.  They fire the events, but send consent mode “denied” until the user agrees to tracking. This will instruct Google to stop adding or using cookies to track data about the user. It’s the privacy solution that Google come up with. A solution that respects the users’ privacy, but still allows for some data to be tracked.

Is this solution GDPR compliant? That’s a complicated questions, and it’s not for us to answer it here. We just want to remind you that GDPR impose obligations for the site owners. They should inform their users and ask their permission regarding tracking. When using Google’s Consent Mode, what happens is that a site owner will track their users in the first place, and rely on a third party, Google, to comply with privacy requirements. 

Because of such nuances, we decided to block scripts when needed as the default option. In order to use Google Consent Mode, you need to manually change the settings inside the ConsentMagic plugin. And to give you more optionality, we decided to go with separate options, one for Google Analytics, and one for Google Ads tag.