Following the recent announcement of the DMA/DSA legislations and the extended responsibilities of the Gatekeepers towards user consent, Google has already shared that they will enlarge the scope of their consent mode tool and make its implementation mandatory for all advertisers willing to use Google audiences and measurement solutions.
What is consent mode?
As a reminder, Google launched its consent mode tool back in 2021. The purpose of consent mode was twofold:
- Improving the measurement of conversions, by modeling the results of the users who haven’t granted their consent to be tracked, by interpolating the date of users who did accept the tracking
- Improving the performances of their Google Ads advertising by ensuring a greater flow of conversions being registered by their algorithm
This was thus a pure marketing tool. If you want a detailed overview of what the tool is, I suggest you take a look at this article written by my colleague Lotte Vranckx.
How will consent mode evolve in 2024?
As of 2024, consent mode will enlarge its scope and also refer to a second tool. This second tool will not be focussed on marketing this time, but on legal. As a matter of fact, consent mode will be the tool which will allow advertisers to share the information with Google marketing tools to indicate that consent has been given or not by a user regarding advertising.
While managing consent was before the sole responsibility of the advertisers, the Gatekeepers now also have the responsibility to ensure that consent has been given before offering their full data based advertising solution. As a consequence, all the companies using Google advertising tools who fail to implement consent mode will not be allowed to use the audience and measurement solution of Google anymore. In other words, advertising on Google would become a shot in the dark. So it’s fair to say that consent mode implementation will basically become mandatory for all advertisers using Google advertising platforms.
How to implement consent mode?
For the advertisers using one of Google's Partner Consent Management Platforms (CMP), the implementation should be fairly easy. You can find the full list of partners here and the implementation guide for each of these tools at the end of the article. For the ones who use other CMP or custom homemade solutions, it will be a bit more work. My colleague Lotte Vranckx wrote an article about how to implement it in GTM that you can find here.
In any case, should you need help regarding its implementation, feel free to contact us and we will guide you through this with pleasure!
Resources list of Google CMP partners