Consent Mode works alongside a cookie banner. Before a visitor chooses, defaults are set — typically 'denied' in regions that require opt-in — and the banner updates them when the visitor accepts or rejects. Version 2, required for advertisers measuring and personalizing ads for users in the European Economic Area since March 2024, added two signals beyond storage consent: ad_user_data and ad_personalization.
When consent is denied, Google tags don't set advertising or analytics cookies; in advanced implementations they send cookieless pings that let Google model conversions it can't observe directly. That keeps measurement and Smart Bidding working as well as possible while honoring privacy choices and regulations like the GDPR.
Example
A visitor in Germany declines cookies, so Google Analytics stores no identifiers for them, but Google can still estimate conversions using aggregated, modeled data.
How Sloss Digital uses it
We implement Consent Mode v2 with region-aware defaults and a compliant consent banner — the same setup that runs on this site — so clients stay compliant without losing the data their campaigns depend on.