Glossary
Consent mode
A setting that passes each visitor's consent choice to your tags, so they change what they send. Google Consent Mode is the most common example.
Also called: consent signalling
Before consent signalling, the choice was binary: a tag either fired or it did not. Consent mode adds a third state — the tag fires, but it is told what it is allowed to do, and it degrades accordingly. Without consent it may send a request carrying no identifiers, which lets the platform count something without storing anything on the visitor’s device.
The distinction that causes most of the confusion: consent is the legal permission you obtained from the visitor. Consent mode is the technical mechanism that communicates that permission to your tags. Implementing the mechanism does not obtain the permission, and a correctly configured consent mode sitting behind a banner that nobody meaningfully agreed to is a well-plumbed compliance problem.
What it means for your reporting. Consented and non-consented visitors are measured differently, so the gap does not appear as missing rows. It appears as modeled conversions filling in the space, which means your totals combine observation and estimation in a proportion that shifts with your consent rate. A banner redesign can move reported conversions without a single thing changing about the business.
Two practical points. Consent rates vary enormously by region and by how the banner is built, so cross-market comparisons are usually comparing banner designs. And moving tags server-side does not change any of this — it changes who sends the request, never whether you were permitted to.
Do not confuse with
Close enough to get mixed up, different enough that the mix-up costs something.
- Cookie window How long a tracking cookie stays valid after a browser stores it. When the cookie expires, a returning visitor can no longer be linked to the earlier click.
- Server-side tagging Sending marketing and analytics events from your own server instead of the visitor's browser, so requests that browser blockers stop can reach the platform.
- Tracking prevention Browser features that shorten how long identifiers last and block some tracking requests. Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention is the best-known example.