Google Consent Mode

What is Google Consent Mode (GCM)?

Google Consent Mode (GCM) is a framework that allows a site to adjust how Google tags behave based on whether a user grants consent for marketing, analytics, and personalization cookies. As a user designates consent preferences for each cookie, GCM sends these consent statuses directly to Google. This enables Google services like Google Analytics and Google Ads to respect privacy preferences and stay compliant with privacy regulations (GDPR, ePrivacy, etc.) while still receiving limited, non-identifying data if consent is not granted by the user.

When consent is not granted, GCM uses modeled conversions and aggregated measurement to help fill in gaps in reporting, without using cookies or personal identifiers. This helps marketers and site owners maintain more accurate performance measurement and conversion attribution.

Freshpaint Consent Manager and Google Consent Mode

When a user engages with Freshpaint Consent Manager and makes consent selections for each cookie category, the selections are saved to Freshpaint Consent Manager. When Enable Google Consent Mode is enabled in Freshpaint, these selections will pass through to GCM.

Consent status values are denied or granted. When Enable Google Consent Mode is enabled, non-essential conset types will default to denied in GCM but be replaced with Freshpaint Consent Manager consent values when the Freshpaint SDK loads. User changes to consent in Freshpaint Consent Manager will be reflected in GCM. functionality_storage and security_storage are treated as essential and will always have a status of granted.

Freshpaint Consent Manager will map the status value of denied or granted to each of these consent types in GCM:

GCM Consent Type	Category
ad_storage	Marketling
ad_user_data	Marketing
ad_personalization	Marketing
analytics_storage	Analytics
personalization_storage	Personalization
functionality_storage	Essential
security_storage	Essential

For the extended definitions of these GCM consent types, and to understand how granted and denied status affects Google tag behavior, see the Google documentation here.

Values that are changed directly in GCM will not be reflected in FPCM. Consent values in FPCM change only on user interaction with the banner.

Setup

1. To enable passthrough to GCM, toggle on the Enable Google Consent Mode option in Freshpaint.

1. In Google Tag Manger, download and add the Freshpaint template from Gallery. Create a new Tag using this template and select the Freshpaint Google Consent Mode Initialization tag type.

Impact of consent on tag behavior

The Freshpaint Google Consent Mode Initialization tag (shown above) will always set ads_data_redaction to true. To understand more about how that will interact with Google Tags, please see Google's documentation ("ad_storage and ads_data_redaction" section).