What does Google Tag Manager consent mode mean for tracking?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you’ll be aware of the headache that the UK’s ICO cookie guidance has caused digital marketers and analytics experts.
To improve privacy and consent on the web, the ICO and the EU (as well as other Governments and organisations around the world) have set a precedent for what is expected from websites in terms of management of cookies and cookie usage for marketing and analytics.
The intentions are good, but the impact to website owners and marketers can be significant if not disastrous.
As well as the loss of data from website visitors opting out of cookies, there is also a fair amount of effort involved in configuring your tag management system to work alongside your consent management platform.
Reduce trigger group mayhem
There are a few different ways to configure your tracking and tagging to play nicely with your consent management platform, but each method has its own shortcomings or workload requirements that can make them unappealing.
Often trigger groups are used in Google Tag Manager to get around the issue of multiple conditions being required to prevent or allow a tag from firing based on a visitor’s preferences.
This is the most accurate and reassuring method for limiting and allowing tags but it means configuring trigger groups for every tag that you have in your tag management system and becomes an ongoing drag on resources as you add more tags.
So…to improve the situation, Google have been working hard on a new consent mode for Google Tag Manager. This is a new API that allows analysts and marketers to access the consent permissions that a user has selected without setting up complex trigger groups.
Find out more about consent mode here.