Everything you need to know about Basic and Advanced Consent Modes for Google Ads, Analytics and GTM

In March 2024 Google started enforcing the use of Consent Mode by websites visited from the European Union. WP Full Picture supports 2 types of consent mode: basic and advanced.

What is consent mode (in layman’s terms)

Consent mode is a method of making tracking tools aware of user consents on the website and adjusting their settings to respect them.

For example, Google Analytics can collect data that can be used for traffic analysis and marketing. If a website visitor agrees to only one of them, then Google’s scrips, can enable only that.

What is the difference between basic and advanced consent mode

In simple words, basic consent mode does not load Google’s script before users make a choice and the advanced mode does. Why?

When a Google Script loads before the user made their privacy choices, it tracks only very basic data. However, you may not see this data in your Google Analytics nor Google Ads! I explain it below.

When will I see data collected in advanced consent mode?

Data that is collected from unconsenting visitors is incomplete, and needs to be modelled to look complete. This modelling is done by an AI that guesses how a visitor would behave on a website if they consented to tracking. However, in order to make better guesses, the AI needs a lot of data from consenting users.

This means that you will not see the data in your GA or GAds reports until you reach:

  • 1000 consenting visitors a day for Google Analytics (source: Google. Link)
  • 700 ad clicks a day (per country) for Google Ads (source: Google. Link)

How to enable consent mode in Google Analytics and Google Ads?

Basic consent mode is the default one in Google Analytics and Google Ads. You don’t need to do anything to use it.

If you want to change it to the Advanced mode, please use a switch in the Consent Banner module settings.

adv consent mode v2 switch

How to use consent mode in Google Tag Manager

WP Full Picture automatically sends to GTM’s dataLayer information on user consents in the format required by Google. You can use it to trigger tags in your GTM containers according to the basic or the advanced consent mode. Here’s a detailed guide.

What to do if you see warnings in GA and GAds dashboards about the lack of consent mode?

It can take up to 7 days for Google to “realize”, that you use consent mode.

However, if you still see warnings in Google Ads and Analytics panels after this period, you don’t need to worry. In most cases, this information is incorrect.

In this article, I explain where to check the correct information about the status of implementation of consent mode.