CEO - Helping You Get More from Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager (Server-Side) - CXL.com Course Instructor - BNI Roman & Speak Some Spanish
🚨 Why companies waste money on paid ads & they don’t even realise it! That’s not scare tactics – it’s a consent tracking issue. We’ve audited dozens of sites over the past year. You’d be amazed how many haven’t properly implemented Consent Mode for Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, or Meta. No Consent Mode = ❌ No tracking for users who click ‘Reject all’ ❌ No enhanced conversions ❌ Incomplete or missing data in GA4 ❌ Wasted ad spend you can’t justify And here’s a common misconception: Blocking GTM until consent is granted isn’t enough. Unless your individual tags are configured to respect consent signals, they may still fire — and you’re not compliant. Even worse – many brands think they’re compliant because they’ve got a cookie banner. But: ⚠️ Consent Mode isn’t automatically wired in. Especially when tags are manually added or use old GTM setups. ⚠️ According to the ICO, your banner must give equal prominence to ‘Accept’ and ‘Reject’. You can’t bury the reject option on a second layer. And if you haven’t implemented Consent Mode v2 by now, your data could already be non-compliant — and broken. ✅ Paid traffic showing as ‘Direct’ ✅ Retargeting audiences shrinking ✅ ROAS metrics unreliable ✅ Data loss due to cookieless users (e.g. Safari Incognito) This isn’t just a privacy issue — it’s a data and performance issue. You can’t optimise what you can’t track. 👉 Connect with me and comment “Checklist” below I’ll send you our free GA4/GTM audit checklist to help you fix this. #GoogleAnalytics #ConversionUplift #GA4 #GTM #ServerSide #Stape #BigQuery
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Consent Mode v2 isn't just a compliance checkbox it directly impacts data quality, attribution accuracy, and ultimately, performance. If you're spending on ads without verifying your GA4 & GTM implementation against consent signals, you're essentially flying blind.
If I'm using a standard cookie banner plugin, do I still need to configure Consent Mode separately in GTM?
How can I tell if my tags are actually respecting Consent Mode in GTM?
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Great post Neal Cole - this is why it is so important to get experts involved. Looking forward to your further input on our website!
I thought that with GA4 and Google Ads, you generally don't need to add additional consent requirements in GTM because the tags themselves are designed to read the consent state set by the CMP and adjust their behaviour accordingly? I assumed it was only third party / custom HTML tags that needed additional consent settings (like ad_storage etc for the Meta Pixel)?
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Martech Data Privacy matters! Let's talk
2moRepeat after me: gcs=G111 gcd=13l3l3l3l3