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Google’s Consent Mode remains a key topic, particularly as it will be mandatory in 2024 for websites or apps collecting data for audience building or remarketing using Google’s advertising services.

I’ve previously covered Consent Mode and even created a Google Tag Manager community gallery template to help manage it on websites.

With version 2 (V2), the major updates include two new consent signals: ad_user_data and ad_personalization, along with a revamped URL schema for passing consent states to Google’s services.

This article is a guest post by Markus Baersch, who originally wrote a comprehensive Consent Mode FAQ in German.

In this post, we’ll revisit the FAQ in English and ensure it’s fully updated with everything you need to know about Consent Mode, especially the changes in V2.

What does Consent Mode do?

Consent Mode focuses on collecting additional signals from users who have not given consent for their personal data or browser storage to be accessed for data collection. These signals are then used by Google to model conversions (Google Ads, Floodlight, etc.) and analyze visitor behavior (Google Analytics 4).

This approach gathers analytics and advertising data from non-consenting users by avoiding access to browser storage. Instead of using cookies containing personal data (such as online identifiers), Google relies on random, temporary identifiers.

Unconsented data is not shown directly in Google’s reports. Instead, it undergoes a modeling process to resemble data collected from consenting users.

What’s new in Consent Mode V2?

In version 2 (V2), the original Consent Mode signals—ad_storage (for advertising cookies) and analytics_storage (for analytics cookies)—are enhanced with two new signals:

• ad_user_data: Does the user consent to their personal data being used for advertising purposes?
• ad_personalization: Does the user consent to their data being used for remarketing?

Tags with built-in Consent Mode support

The following Google product tags include built-in consent checks and automatically adjust their behavior based on the user’s consent status:

• Google Tag
• Google Analytics
• Google Ads*
• Floodlight
• Conversion Linker