Consent Mode

Consent Mode is Google's system for adjusting how its tags behave based on the consent choices a user makes in your cookie banner.

You install a consent banner, and Consent Mode reads the visitor's answer through two signals: analytics_storage and ad_storage. When a user grants consent, GA4 and Google Ads tags fire normally and write cookies. When a user denies it, the tags still fire but send cookieless pings with no identifiers, so you get a signal that something happened without tracking the person.

Someone lands on your checkout page and clicks "reject" on your banner. With Consent Mode running, the GA4 tag does not set a cookie or record a client ID, but it still sends a stripped ping recording that a page was viewed and a purchase occurred. Google uses those pings later to estimate the conversions you could not measure directly.

Consent Mode v2 is not optional if you run Google Ads in the EEA. Since March 2024, without ad_user_data and ad_personalization signals passed through v2, remarketing audiences and conversion enhancements stop working for European traffic. People confuse installing a banner with installing Consent Mode; the banner alone changes nothing unless it is wired to the consent signals.

The banner asks the question. Consent Mode is what listens to the answer.