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Cookie Compliance and Consent Management are extremely important, and we encourage our clients to set up banners to give their users the option to opt out of tracking. Consent Management is a service that is offered by BFO’s Analytics department, and it is quite detailed. While we are not lawyers, we do consider ourselves experts in Cookie Compliance and Consent Management.
Understanding Legal Requirements
To begin to understand the legality of consent management, it’s important to know that in the US these laws are based on state jurisdiction. As of this post, there is no federal law in place. And while everyone knows about the EU and GDPR, there are many more international laws that are relevant. In particular, we’ve dealt with strict laws in Brazil, China, Quebec, and South Africa. The one commonality amongst the many laws that have been rolled out is that they all have certain criteria or thresholds that must be met before a business is held liable. In the US, the most strict law is California's. Under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), a business can be held liable if they meet any of the following criteria for users:
- Annual Gross Revenue: The business' gross annual revenue must exceed $25 million.
- Data Handling Threshold: The business must buy, sell, or share the personal information of at least 100,000 consumers or households annually. This includes both consumers and households, and it's calculated based on the number of individuals whose data is handled, not necessarily the number of transactions.
- Revenue from Data Sales: If 50% or more of the business's annual revenue comes from selling or sharing consumers' personal information, the CCPA applies.
Companies can begin to investigate whether or not they meet these thresholds by checking Google Analytics. If GA4 does not have revenue, start with user count. Then look at your most accurate data source for total revenue.
Understanding Banner Types
There are a few key differences between banner types. The most common difference is whether they are opt-in or opt-out. So is to say, having an opt-in banner will have language asking for your permission before deploying tracking. Meanwhile, an opt-out banner gives the user the option to decline after cookies have already been deployed. Yours is sort of in between both. Tracking is not deployed unless a user clicks accept or navigates to additional pages. The type of banner used is determined by regional law as well.
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Impact On Attribution & Pixel Performance
Opt-In banners pose a major attribution problem. The simple version is, if tracking does not deploy on the first page, the utm parameters are stripped from the URL. Without UTM parameters, all traffic will be marked as direct. This will ruin your attribution reports, and take away the work that the advertising pixels do to ensure that they are to optimize towards your best audience.
Minimize Data Loss With Google Consent Mode
Google offers an easy fix for their tags: Google Consent Mode.
Google Consent Mode is a feature that allows website and app developers to adapt how Google tags (like those for Google Analytics and Google Ads) behave based on user consent choices regarding data collection and processing. It ensures that Google services respect user privacy by adjusting their functionality based on whether users have granted consent for advertising and analytics purposes. It retains user data by collecting anonymized hits and using machine learning to piece together attribution.
We recommend our clients set up consent mode to ensure that attribution is tracked properly and that advertising pixels are able to optimize their audiences. At a base level, this can be set up with some minor code adjustments to the website and updates made to the Google Tag Manager Container. If you’d like to explore using your current banner with Google Consent Mode, we can discuss getting the updates made to both your website code and the GTM container.
I wrote a blog that explains Consent Mode in depth, I recommend checking that out here.
Consent Management Platforms
Because this is such a complex issue, we recommend our clients use Consent Management Platforms over implementing custom banners of their own. This takes the stress of staying up to date with different regional laws away from your development team, offers regional deployment of different banner types, and gives access to a whole set of data about how your users are interacting with these banners.
Through our own research and vetting, BFO has partnered with two trusted CMP providers — Usercentrics and Onetrust. If you're interested in exploring compliance and consent more seriously for your brand, I can get you a partner quote for both the platforms themselves and our services of setting up and maintaining them on a monthly basis (just reach out here).
Still Have Cookie Consent Questions?
Deploying a cookie consent banner can be confusing. Luckily, there are easy solutions that can be put in place to fix it. We believe that it is important to have consent banners on all websites, regardless of whether or not our clients meet the legal thresholds for liability. In order to measure Paid Media and SEO Performance to the best of our ability, it is critical that we be able to both measure the performance of your campaigns and allow pixels to optimize to reach your best audience.
If you'd like to discuss cookie compliance and consent, please drop us a line!
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