Consent Mode V2 and The Digital Markets Act

Cutting to the chase, what do advertisers actually need to do?

• Ensure you have a Consent Management Platform (yep, another acronym, CMP) which let users control what cookies they accept
• Implement Basic Consent Mode, as per the below, if you want to continue to use Google Ads remarketing and auto-bidding amongst other features. This needs to be done by 6th March 2024.
• For those looking to use GA4 to build audiences, or exporting conversions – then, yes, GA4 is needed
• Update to the latest versions of APIs and SDKs (if relevant) for Google Ads and DV360
• Make sure your privacy policy reflects what you’re doing on site!

What's Basic Consent Mode?

Good question.

To take a step back, historically we’ve thought about cookie consent and consent mode in two buckets, as it relates to Google products:

1. Client has a cookie consent banner on the website and there’s logic built into ensure that when a user rejects cookies, we don’t fire GA4 tags or similar.
2. Client has a cookie consent banner on the website and there’s logic built into ensure that when a user rejects cookies, we don’t set GA4 cookies, we pass a consent flag to Google and instead we fire cookieless pings to Google, to use for modelling purposes and allow us to “get back” some of the data we lost (in Google Ads and GA4).

You can think of point two as Full or Advanced Consent Mode. This has been extended in a recent update to include two new signals – ad_user_data and ad_personalisation. These need to be granted in order to send data to Google Ads and to build audience for remarketing in GA4. This most recent update is what's being referred to as Consent Mode v2.

In Basic Consent Mode, we basically do the same as point 1 above AND we fire a consent flag to Google – i.e. to say that the user consented to collecting the information. In this instance, if a user does not consent to cookies, no cookieless pings are sent. 

What has caused this?

The Digital Markets Act, or DMA, is a new piece of legislation that has two key objectives, and which comes into effect in March 2024. The first objective is to continue to ensure consumer privacy is prioritised, in particular around the issue of consent to collect data. The second is to make sure there is a level playing field amongst the main digital platforms.

Who does the Digital Markets Act affect?

The DMA affects two main parties:

• Digital platforms – the European Commission recently identified six platforms as “digital gatekeepers”. They are, no surprise, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (TikTok), Meta, Microsoft and Google (under their parent company, Alphabet)

• Digital advertisers – as per the required actions above

What does this mean for the digital platforms in general?

In short, it means that they have to comply with a series of “do’s” and “don’ts” – more can be found here. These are a series of principles that make things more transparent for end-users and try to avoid the ever-increasingly high walled gardens from building higher walls.



There’s also a very specific “don’t” which is around targeted advertising:

These principles will have different actions for each platform but all of them have six months from the point of decision to ensure they comply which brings us to the March deadline.

And so for Google, it's all about consent

For Google specifically, a big focus is on ensuring that data sent to them has a valid consent flag. This will apply to all Google Measurement Technologies, and to all organisations that have users from the European Economic Area (EEA).

There will be consequences for organisations that don’t send data with a valid consent flag although these have yet to be finalized – it’s certainly safe to assume that certain features within accounts might be suspended or data potentially deleted.

As we've outlined - in practice, Google has suggested that all organisations will have to have implemented Basic Consent Mode by March 2024 or face having their retargeting and bidding functionality suspended.

If you need some help to navigate the version of Consent Mode, or the new acronyms, give us a shout. We are here to act as your compass, including all things server-side tracking and privacy-related measurement.