Understanding the Impact of Google Consent Mode For Your Business in 2024 – InstantFollowerz

U May 2023 reportGoogle states that “with the introduction of consent mode, Air France’s viewable conversions increased by 9% across Europe” after experiencing a 20% drop in conversions due to recent compliance with cookie guidelines.

How can a company benefit from more accurate measurement as privacy regulations become more stringent? The consent mode is a solution proposed by Google to continue providing valuable insights in a privacy-first digital world.

This guide contains everything you need to know about opt-in mode, including what it is, why it should be important to website owners or advertisers, and how to activate it in no time. Let’s dive in.

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What is Google Consent Mode?

Google Consent Mode is a solution designed by Google to help businesses cover measurement gaps when users opt out of sharing their data, usually via a “Reject” button on a website’s cookie banner.

For visitors who want to swim give their consent, companies are still able to get some key trends using existing data from consenting users. More on the “how” later.

In short, we can say that the consent method helps advertisers, publishers or website owners to comply with the consent requirements set by data protection laws (e.g. GDPR) while still using Google services (such as Analytics and ads).

Who is Google’s consent mode for?

Consent Mode is a solution developed by Google for customers who use audience features for the following products:

• Google Analytics
• Google Ads
• Floodlight
• Conversion Linker

If you are an advertiser, publisher, developer or website owner with a presence in Europe, consent is usually required to carry out marketing activities. This includes serving personalized ads or collecting analytics through trackers.

If this is your case, I would recommend looking into the consent method.

How does Google consent work?

The consent mode strikes the perfect balance between respecting user privacy and gathering valuable data insights.

To respect the user’s consent, adjusts how Google tags behave based on the advertising or analytics tracking consent status given on the website banner. When consent is denied, tags are not loaded and trackers are not used. No data is collected about the user.

To add value for Google usersuses technology called conversion modeling to recover lost conversion data for non-opt-in users and for better performance insight.

More about conversion modeling

Without getting too many In technical detail, conversion modeling uses AI, probability and machine learning to analyze observable data and trends from opt-in users.

It then models the paths and quantifies the relationship between consenting users and non-consenting users to report conversion data for all visitors.

The key takeaway is that conversion modeling measures much more accurately Conversion rate without using any identifying information — so it doesn’t invade privacy.

What are the benefits of Google Consent Mode?

Let’s start with a practical example.

Example: Volkswagen Belgium

This 2024 Volkswagen Belgium Case Study is probably the best way to demonstrate the significant impact Google Consent Mode can have on your business.

As a car company, Volkswagen collects data about potential car buyers through cookies understand how they interact with their website.

This is crucial for them because “as much insight as possible”. [they] Haven […]as efficiently and effectively as possible [their] campaigns can be.”

What they realized is that over the years users have become more privacy conscious. This has led many to abandon analytics cookies.

“For some brands, consent acceptance rates have fallen by 20% in just two years,” the article states. What did this mean? Loss of valuable data and a distorted view of reality because user activity could not be tracked.

They implemented a consent mode and managed to recover almost all 20% of the data lost due to the drop in cookie acceptance.

In turn, this gave them more accurate insight into performance and helped optimize, allocate and calculate the ROI of media campaigns.

Why it’s worth using Google’s consent method

Here are the reasons why I believe consent mode can be a game changer for you:

• With a legally required consent banner on your site, users can refuse to consent to tracking.
• For you, this means losing the ability to collect valuable data about these users because you can’t track them.
• This results in gaps in measurement and less insight from existing campaigns.
• With consent mode activated, you respect the user’s consent AND continue to report conversions.
• This means you learn more about your ad spend and can effectively attribute conversions to the right campaigns.
• You can also take advantage of better offers, reallocate your budget to your best performing campaigns or target a specific audience.

Conclusion: Google’s opt-in method can allow you to better optimize your marketing efforts and increase your revenue.

How to activate Google consent mode

There are different ways to implement consent modes, some more technical than others. So I decided to focus on one method recommended by Google in their main user guide.

Best practice: Use a consent management platform.

A Consent Management Platform (CMP) is a software solution designed to collect, store and manage user consent for certain data collection activities (ie, analytics, advertising, retargeting) through consent banners on a website or in an application.

To simplify the process of activating consent mode, Google has specially selected a list of CMP partners that can support it.

These Google Certified CMPs can help install a banner on your website with an opt-in mode. Some of the leading tools include iubenda, Didomi, consentmanager or Osano.

These solutions are the key to fast, simple and reliable activation. They allow for full banner customization that complies with major consent regulations such as GDPR and Cookie Law, as well as Google’s EUUCP policy.

When using CMP, consent mode is usually enabled by default. It can also be configured via Google Tag Manager.

New Implications for 2024: Google Consent Mode Version Two

Originally introduced in 2020, Google Consent Mode has been revised at a pivotal time in the digital industry.

With the growing need for transparency and fairness on the internet, the implementation of a new EU law called Law on Digital Marketsand the new possibilities provided by AIGoogle introduced an updated version of Consent Mode in March 2024.

What’s new in V2

The solution now works with two new tags for better control and respect for user consent. That makes a total of four:

• analytics_storage: cookies installed for analytical purposes
• ad_storage: cookies installed for advertising purposes
• [New in V2] ad_personalization: defining whether personalized advertising can be enabled (e.g. for remarketing)
• [New in V2] ad_user_data: defining whether user data can be sent to Google for advertising purposes

Now, Google also offers two levels of implementation to choose from when consent is denied:

• basic: Relevant tags remain completely blocked, and user data is not collected.
• advanced: Relevant tags adjust their behavior and conversion data is refreshed through modeling.

Latest requirements

The second version of the consent mode came along with new requirements for Google users in an effort to meet higher standards for consent during 2024.

From March 2024, you must do the following to continue using the audience measurement and personalization features for European users within Google services:

You must set up a consent method on your website to carry out activities such as remarketing and conversion tracking in Google Ads and Google Analytics in Europe. If not, your access to these features will be limited.

What happens if you don’t implement Google’s consent method?

Advertisers who do not use the opt-in method will lose the ability to capture new European users in audience lists within Google products. In other words, you won’t be able to use audience features for users in this region.

This is probably crucial to your marketing strategy and your overall performance, whether you’re running ads or collecting analytics on your website.

You’ll also miss out on invaluable data that can be reported using conversion modeling for users who opt out of your banner. Wouldn’t you like a more accurate representation of your performance while respecting user consent?

Save and improve your marketing efforts with the Google opt-in method

If you use Google services, such as Google Ads or Google Analytics, it is in your interest to activate the consent mode.

In fact, the release of Consent Mode version two and its new requirements made waves in the advertising industry. That’s major news for Google users.

As mentioned throughout this guide, its impact is negligible. Without it, you could lose access to audience features and miss out on valuable insights for informed decision-making.

Although mandatory when targeting European users, any website owner, publisher or advertiser should consider using the opt-in method.

Not only does it ensure compliance with privacy laws and the latest Google requirements – it also provides a more accurate view of marketing performance.