Managing user consent

This article is for users who wish to know more about consent management and implementing a consent solution.

Websites and apps using Google measurement services gather and store information about website visitor and app user behavior. Consent management involves:

1. Obtaining visitors’ choice to grant or deny consent for storing information about their behavior.
2. Communicating that consent state to the measurement system.
3. Ensuring that Google and third-party tags that store or read cookies comply with users’ choice.

For requirements 1 and 2, Google customers can use a third-party Consent Management Platform (CMP) or implement a custom consent solution. Consent Mode meets the third requirement.

Google Consent Mode enables measurement customers to set a default consent state for each type of storage they use. When a website visitor or app user indicates their consent choices, Consent Mode preserves the choices across their interaction with the website or app.

The IAB Europe Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF) is an alternative way of obtaining and tracking consent state. If a customer’s custom implementation or their CMP uses the TCF to obtain consent, it passes consent state to Google as a special TCF string. The Google tag or Tag Manager can read this string and set measurement behavior for tags with consent checks. See IAB Transparency and Consent Framework v2 and Google Analytics for more details. For those who use TCF v2.0 but are not yet registered on the IAB Europe Global Vendor List (GVL), Google provides Additional Consent Mode as described in Google’s Additional Consent Mode technical specification.

For websites, Consent Mode causes tags with consent checks to adjust storage behavior. If a user denies consent, tags no longer store cookies but instead send pings (signals) to the Google Server as described in Consent Mode behavior. This means that not all information about visitors who deny consent is lost and it enables Google Analytics 4 properties to model conversions as described in [GA4] About modeled conversions.

Enabling Consent Mode

Website developers can enable Consent Mode using gtag consent commands, a tag created from a Tag Manager Consent Mode template, or the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF).

App developers can use consent configuration and APIs, as described in Tag Manager and Firebase documentation.

We recommend that customers using Google Tag Manager enable Consent Mode with a Tag Manager Consent Mode template created by their CMP (or by the implementer of the custom consent management solution). For more information, see:

• Consent Mode on websites
• Manage consent settings (web)
• Configure Consent Mode in Tag Manager templates

Consent management platform integrations

Consent management platforms (CMPs) are able to integrate with Consent Mode and consent settings in Google Tag Manager. Tag Manager Featured CMPs have templates available in the Tag Manager Community Template Gallery which are integrated with our Consent APIs. Refer to the table below for more information on how CMPs have integrated with Consent Mode:

Consent Tool	Supported consent types	Tag Manager Community Template available	Integrated with consent update calls	Integrated with consent default calls
Commanders Act	ad_storage analytics_storage functionality_storage personalization_storage  security_storage	✓	✓	✓ (Integrated GTM template + TrustCommander template)
Consentmanager	ad_storage analytics_storage	✓	✓	✓ (Integrated GTM template + code example for gtag.js)
Cookie Information A/S	ad_storage analytics_storage functionality_storage personalization_storage  security_storage	✓	✓	✓ (Integrated GTM template + code example for gtag.js)
Cookiebot (Cybot)	ad_storage analytics_storage functionality_storage personalization_storage  security_storage	✓	✓	✓ (Integrated GTM template + code example for gtag.js)
Crownpeak	ad_storage analytics_storage		✓	✓ (provided as an in-page code example only)
Didomi	ad_storage analytics_storage functionality_storage personalization_storage  security_storage	✓	✓	✓ (Full GTM + non-GTM integration)
iubenda	ad_storage analytics_storage functionality_storage personalization_storage  security_storage		✓	✓ (provided as an in-page code example only)
LiveRamp	ad_storage analytics_storage		✓	✓ (provided as an in-page code example only)
OneTrust	ad_storage analytics_storage functionality_storage personalization_storage  security_storage	✓	✓	✓ (Integrated GTM template + code example for gtag.js)
Osano	ad_storage analytics_storage	✓	✓	✓ (Integrated GTM template + code example for gtag.js)
Sourcepoint	ad_storage analytics_storage functionality_storage personalization_storage  security_storage		✓	✓ (provided as an in-page code example only)
Usercentrics	ad_storage analytics_storage functionality_storage personalization_storage  security_storage	✓	✓	✓ (Integrated GTM template + code example for gtag.js)

CMP providers should implement Consent Mode integrations for their customers based on the tagging platform (Google Tag Manager or gtag.js). See Consent Mode for CMP providers for more information.

Other customer privacy controls

Regardless of how customers manage user consent, they can also control the following:

• How to share collected data with Google. See Data sharing settings for details.
• Whether Google anonymizes IP addresses. See IP Anonymization (or IP masking) in Google Analytics for details.
• The amount of time before user-level and event-level data stored by Google Analytics is automatically deleted from Analytics servers. See Data retention for details.
• Manual deletion of data from Google Analytics servers. See [GA4] Data-deletion requests or Data deletion requests (Universal Analytics) for details.
• Which Google accounts, products, and services an account administrator links together. Everyone with account view permissions will have access to the data from all linked accounts. See Google Analytics linking overview for details.