How to use 2GDPR.com to track your visitors according to GDPR
2GDPR.com is a free online scanner that checks your website for possible GDPR-related issues. In this article, I will tell you how to use it and how to fix these issues with WP Full Picture.
What do we want to achieve?
We will use 2GDPR.com to find tracking tools and scripts that start tracking visitors before they agree to tracking. Later we will make all of them load after visitors’ consents using different modules in WP Full Picture.
How to use 2GDPR.com
When you enter your domain name in the 2GDPR.com, it will scan your website and show you a list of detected issues. The ones that interest us the most are in the categories “Prior consent to other than strictly necessary cookies” and “Prior consent to personal data”.
They look like this.
What interests us the most is the list of incorrectly setup tracking tools that 2GDPR found.
In this example, we have 2 problematic tools – Google Analytics and WooCommerce – but you may find different ones on your site.
Now, let’s see how you can fix them.
Step 1. Enable the consent banner module
This is a no-brainer. If you do not have the consent banner module enabled, this is the time to enable it.
Set it to opt-in mode or one of the automatic modes, to make sure your visitors are asked for consent to tracking before they are tracked.
Step 2. Fix the WooCommerce problem
The issue with the WooCommerce is unique, so I decided to describe in a separate section.
Recently, WooCommerce got a feature that tracks sources of orders using cookies. This may break privacy laws (depending on their interpretation). Fortunately, you can either :
- disable it in “WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Features > Order Attribution”,
- or make it follow visitors tracking consents with the Tracking Tools Manager module.
Simply enable the “SourceBuster” option in the Tracking Tools Manager’s settings, and you are done.
Step 3. Take control over the problematic tracking tools
Apart from WooCommerce, 2GDPR detected problems with a tracking tool Google Analytics (but you may have different ones on your website).
WP Full Picture gives you a few different ways to take control over this and other tools and load them according to privacy laws.
If your tool was installed with a plugin
If your tool was installed with a plugin, you can:
1. Disable the plugin and install the tool with one of ready-to-use modules in WP Full Picture,
2. or do not disable the plugin but take control over it with the Tracking Tools Manager plugin.
If your tool was installed with a code snippet
If your tool was installed directly on the page (using a piece of code with an JavaScript snippet), you can:
1. Move the snippet to a “Custom scripts” module in WP Full Picture
2. or take control over it with the Tracking Tools Manager plugin
If your tool was installed using Google Tag Manager
If your tool was installed using Google Tag Manager, you can:
- (advanced) Remove the script that installed your original Google Tag Manager and install GTM again with WP Full picture’s module. When you do this, WP Full Picture will send to GTM’s dataLayer information on consents provided by the visitor. You will need to use them as conditions for triggering the tag with the script that installs your tracking tool.
- or remove the tool from GTM and install it with one of ready-to-use modules or the Custom Scripts module in WP FP.
And that is it!
Once WP Full Picture has control over your tracking tools, it will let them track your visitors only after they agree to tracking and specific use of their personal data in the consent banner.