Why your website needs Consent Management.
Your website should allow your users to control the type of data being transferred to third parties.
Third-party sites are the likes of Google, Twitter, Facebook and other services, i.e advertising, that are used on your website.
Consent management allows the website visitor to opt-in or opt-out of the services you use on your website.
Why do you need Consent Management on your website?
A consent management system helps your business to obtain user consent and allow the website visitor to decide whether to allow cookies and/or trackers to be used to process their personal data.
Providing it is used correctly, a consent management platform can automate the consent management process and make it easier to be GDPR compliant.
How does Consent Management work?
You need to identify all of the 3rd party scripts running on your website.
Once you have identified your scripts, the next step is making sure that none of the scripts can send data if a user does not want to.
Website scripts are typically broken down into categories so that the user can control what data is allowed or not.
- Necessary: Cookies that are required for the functionality of the website. These normally can’t be switched off as the website won’t work without them.
- Performance: Cookies that are used to provide statistical information about the website. They are used to measure the performance of the website to help make improvements.
- Functional: Cookies that are used to enhance website functionality and allow for user personalisation, i.e chats, videos and the use of social media.
- Advertising: Cookies that are set through the website site by advertising partners.
Your website scripts may include :
- Google Analytics that tracks and reports website traffic
- Facebook Pixel is used to help you understand your traffic and improve your ads to/from Facebook.
- Scripts such as Google Ads, CRM integration, online chats etc.
How do you perform Consent Management on your website?
There are multiple ways of doing this.
- You can change your website scripts to comply with GDPR
- You can use Google Tag Manager and your consent management program to deal with user consent.
- Use your Consent Management system to prevent scripts from loading before the user’s consent is given.
At this point whenever someone visits your website and accepts a certain kind of category, the 3rd party scripts assigned to the category will be executed on the website and it sets cookies in your browser.
What happens if I decline consent?
You might wonder what happens when you then decline the cookies or change the categories.
As an example, if you accepted ‘Performance’ which has Google Analytics associated with it, and then reject the performance category a few days later the Analytics cookies are still there. This would be correct as you cannot delete cookies that have been set by other scripts. This would be a security risk.
As the 3rd party script is no longer run, Google cannot receive data from your browser and thus the data is not shared anymore.
Do you want to get your website compliant easily?
- Register for your free 14-day trial account of the Consent Management platform.
- Scan your website for cookies & third party trackers. You can simply add in your third party tracking scripts.
- Your third party tracking scripts are loaded AFTER your visitors give consent, so you are more compliant with GDPR.
