It's probably no surprise to anyone today that our measurement
landscape is changing in light of new and ongoing privacy initiatives.
Advertisers across the world are navigating several
regulatory challenges related to cookie consent.
We have assessed that advertisers who implement consent banners, experience
a significant drop in attributed or reported conversions,
which severely impacts overall performance reporting and all downstream capabilities
like Smart Bidding and attribution, resulting in ROAS and revenue declines.
Consent Mode is built to help you preserve your measurement after implementing
consent banners so you do not experience a measurement loss
while maintaining user privacy.
Consent Mode introduces two new tag settings that manage cookies
for advertising and analytics purposes for advertisers
using the Global site tag or Google Tag Manager.
These two settings can be used to customize how Google tags
behave before and after users make their consent decisions,
helping advertisers more effectively measure conversions, while respecting user
consent choices for ads cookies and analytics cookies.
In practice, here's what that means.
Let's say someone visits your website and makes their consent selection
for the use of ads cookies on your cookie consent banner.
With Consent Mode,
your Google tags will be able to determine whether or not permission has been given
for your site to use cookies for advertising purposes for that user.
If a user consents, conversion measurement reporting continues normally.
If a user does not consent, the relevant Google tags
will adjust accordingly and not use ads cookies,
measuring conversions at a more aggregate level instead.
We then use conversion modeling to fill measurement gaps
where we are unable to directly tie users' ad interactions to conversions.
Consent Mode has two key value propositions for advertisers:
Privacy, allowing your Google tags to behave in a consent-aware way
and measurement, recovering gaps through conversion modeling.
Let's look deeper into modeling.
Conversion modeling uses machine learning to analyze trends in observable data
to quantify the relationship between conversion rates and user consent state.
Then, using observable user journeys where users have consented
to cookie storage, our models fill in missing attribution paths.
This creates a more complete and accurate view of advertising performance,
all while respecting user cookie consent choices.
Conversion modeling also upholds privacy by not identifying individual users,
unlike tactics like fingerprinting which Google has a strict policy against.
So in short, modeling probabilistically recovers
linkages between ad interactions and conversion events.
Using modeling means advertisers get a better understanding of what's
driving their conversion goals,
and they gain more conversion insights for optimizing campaign bidding.
When we rolled out conversion modeling on Google Ads,
we saw that Consent Mode helps recover over 70% of reported
conversion losses due to user consent choices.
It's important to note that Consent Mode is not a solution for all advertisers,
and if you are in a region with regulations on cookie consent,
we urge you to carefully evaluate if Consent Mode is the right fit for you.
Consent Mode is only helpful for advertisers who have:
already implemented a strict consent banner and are blocking tags
that help with existing measurement.
You should only implement Consent Mode if you meet both of these criteria.
Consent Mode modeling is already available across Google Ads,
SA360 and DV360,
and we are actively working on launching it on Google Analytics.
We are also extremely focused on building an UI diagnostics,
which will help you understand
the impact of Consent Mode and diagnose some common implementation issues.
Implementing Consent Mode requires adding a few lines of code
above your global site tag or Tag Manager container. To help with this process,
we have partnered closely with several Consent Management Platforms - CMPs.
A few are already integrated with Consent Mode and are ready to help.
Our current CMP partners include: Cookiebot, Usercentrics
Iubenda, Osano,
Sourcepoint, OneTrust, Commanders Act,
Consent Manager, LiveRamp, Cookie Information, Crownpeak and Didomi.
If you're interested in getting started with Consent Mode,
please reach out to your Google Account team
or your consent manager platform if you use one.
To learn more about Consent Mode,
visit our Help Center articles or talk to your Google Account team.