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Google Consent Mode: a B2B Marketer’s guide 

Barry Lemon

21 Jun 2024

  Google Consent Mode v2 is an initiative that gives site visitors more say in what data you can collect about them during their visit. Once enabled, it enables people to consent to you collecting their data on your website, which will directly impact what and how much insight you can gather from Google Analytics and for advertising purposes through Google Ads. In other words, it lets you tell Google when people click ‘Allow’ on your cookie banner, and if they do not, the data will not be collected.  The main mechanics are approved cookie tools such as CookieBot. These cookie banners or widgets dynamically adapt the behaviour of Analytics, Ads, and third-party tags that create or read cookies based on what the site visitor selects.  These Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) are the latest addition to your MarTech stack.  It is driven by EU privacy law but also means that your permission management tools can be compliant with other regulations too, such as DMA (EU), GDPR (EU), CCPA (California), LGPD (Brazil), VCDPA (Virginia), TCF 2.2 (IAB), and Google Consent Mode (EU). For B2B marketers targeting an international audience, this provides welcome peace of mind. They’re easy to implement on the surface but important, too, as many legacy methods may no longer be appropriate.  We say on the surface as when implemented, there is additional configuration needed through Google Tag Manager.  This depends on the tags you’re using on your website.  Google tags have built-in consent checks which modify their behaviour based on the consent granted by the site visitor. But other tags for services such as HubSpot, LinkedIn, HotJar, etc (you get the idea) need labelling as what type of cookie so appropriate permission is provided.  Quite laborious to configure if you’re using a comprehensive MarTech stack.  If you miss one, you risk problems with how they’ll fire too so super levels of diligence are needed.  The bad news: B2B marketing to a small audience was already difficult.  It now got even harder.  B2B marketing is already difficult, but now, visibility on a big chunk of the data on what visitors do on our site and the data we collect for marketing purposes will no longer be available.  Based on past B2B audience behaviour over the years we’ve observed, we’re estimating that 30-50% of visitors will deny all cookies, meaning no visibility on a large proportion of your audiences. This means: 
  • Less site visits and conversion data in Google Analytics.  The indicator KPIs that are important when tracking effectiveness just got more difficult. This is why we recommend a rounded view to KPIs when tracking performance.  
  • Visitor data collected by pixels on the site will also be lost if the visitor does not accept some or all cookies.  This will impact:  
    • Advertising networks such as LinkedIn, particularly for techniques such as remarketing.  
    • Clearbit and Leadfeeder technology uses IP to look up insights to profile anonymous audiences.  
    • Automation and ABM platforms such as HubSpot use this technology to plot site visitors and enrich CRM information.  
  • ABM just got more difficult when tracking small audience sizes. So many niches are, by their very nature, small in size.  
Privacy is important.  This is a one-way street.  Regulators will not loosen privacy guidance, so I’m recommending all B2B marketers move ahead with implementation of Google Consent Mode v2 rapidly.  We’re here to help any of our clients that need it naturally, but we’d recommend not holding off.  The intrinsic suspicion of being last at the party is best avoided.    

Barry Lemon

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