Consent mode
Consent mode is Google’s mechanism for telling its advertising and analytics tags whether a website visitor has consented to cookies. The tags then adjust what they store and send instead of firing regardless.
Also called: Google Consent Mode, Consent Mode v2, consent signals
A consent management platform (the cookie banner) records the visitor’s choice and passes it to Google’s tags as a set of signals: whether analytics storage and advertising storage are allowed and, since the 2024 “v2” update, whether user data may be sent to Google and used for personalized advertising. Tags read the signals before they run.
In its basic form, tags simply do not load until consent is given. In its advanced form the tags load but send cookieless, anonymous pings when consent is refused, from which Google models the conversions it can no longer observe directly. Google has required consent mode for measuring visitors from the European Economic Area with its advertising products since March 2024.
For a business tracking phone leads, consent mode decides whether a call click can be attributed to the ad that produced it. A click from a visitor who declined analytics storage still happened; it just cannot be tied to a session, which is why consent rates show up directly in reported cost per lead.