Marketers are facing a major shift in how advertising platforms collect and process user data. What once felt like a backend compliance issue is now directly tied to how campaigns perform.
With the introduction of Google Consent Mode v2 and the evolving requirements around cookie consent, performance marketing has reached a new threshold. Legal compliance, user privacy, and conversion tracking are no longer separate conversations. They now influence each other—and the success of your campaigns.
If your site targets users in the European Economic Area (EEA) or relies on tools like Google Ads and Analytics, the way you manage user consent can affect everything from data accuracy to ad efficiency. Consent is now part of the performance equation.
Understanding Consent Mode v2
Google Consent Mode is a framework that allows websites to control how Google tags behave based on a user’s consent choices. The first version offered some flexibility, but version 2, introduced in late 2023, adds new parameters that significantly expand its scope.
The two new parameters, ad_user_data and ad_personalization, enable more detailed control over how user data is collected and used. Together with the existing ad_storage and analytics_storage settings, these parameters help marketers define exactly what happens when a user accepts or declines cookie tracking.
As of March 2024, Google requires businesses targeting EEA users to implement Consent Mode v2 if they are using Google Ads, Google Analytics, or other related services. Without it, core functionality in those platforms may be reduced or disabled. That includes remarketing, conversion tracking, and audience modeling. The result is incomplete reporting and fewer signals available for campaign optimization.
Cookie Consent as a Legal and Marketing Requirement
Consent banners are not just about regulatory boxes. They are a foundational part of how businesses manage trust, transparency, and compliance. Global privacy laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States require websites to obtain informed, explicit consent before collecting personal data through cookies and similar technologies.
One key principle in these laws is what regulators call “symmetry of choice.” This means users must be able to decline tracking as easily as they can accept it. Banners that obscure opt-out options, use dark patterns, or require multiple clicks to decline can result in legal penalties—even if the technical infrastructure is sound.
This is no longer a hypothetical risk. In March 2025, the California Privacy Protection Agency fined Honda $632,500 for violating the CCPA. The issues included requiring excessive personal information to opt out, making it more difficult to decline data sharing than to accept it, and sharing personal data without proper safeguards in place. This case shows that enforcement is active and that regulators are paying close attention to how consent mechanisms are designed and implemented.
The Business Impact of Incomplete Consent Implementation
If consent is not managed correctly, performance marketing suffers. Without proper signals, Google cannot personalize ads, track conversions accurately, or model user behavior. Campaigns begin to operate with blind spots, and key performance metrics become unreliable.
When users decline consent and Consent Mode is not configured, no fallback data is collected. This leaves gaps in reporting and reduces the effectiveness of tools that rely on conversion modeling or machine learning. However, when Consent Mode v2 is implemented properly, Google can use anonymized data to fill in some of those gaps—preserving campaign performance while respecting user privacy.
In highly competitive B2B markets, these differences add up quickly. Without accurate data, optimization becomes guesswork. Without reliable tracking, it becomes harder to scale what works or cut what doesn’t. The quality of your data infrastructure increasingly defines the quality of your growth strategy.
Why Now Is the Time to Act
Marketers who treat consent as a technical detail risk falling behind. The more strategic view is to treat it as a performance lever. Clean, compliant consent infrastructure protects your ability to measure success and improve over time. It also builds user trust and avoids the operational disruption that can come from audits or legal reviews.
Taking action now means avoiding disruption later. That includes updating your tag management to support Consent Mode v2, auditing your cookie banners to ensure legal compliance, and working with privacy and legal teams to confirm that your policies match current regulations.
Consent Mode is not just about complying with Google’s requirements. It is about maintaining the integrity of your campaign data and keeping your marketing stack future-proof. As privacy expectations continue to rise, companies that adapt early will have a clearer view of their performance and a stronger foundation for growth.
Case Study
Accurate traffic attribution is critical for marketing optimization, especially in a privacy-first digital environment. A leading facilities management service platform faced significant challenges: low organic and paid traffic, disproportionately high direct traffic, and missing conversion data in GA4. Compounding these issues, the site was not equipped with Google’s Consent Mode V2, meaning data from users who declined cookies was excluded from analytics reporting, creating blind spots in campaign performance and user behavior insights.
To address this, we partnered with the client’s data security team to implement OneTrust’s Consent Management Platform (CMP), enabling Google’s Consent Mode V2 across all tag deployments. The initiative was comprehensive: 116 tags and triggers in Google Tag Manager (GTM) were updated to integrate OneTrust consent signals. These updates ensured that tags fired only when appropriate consent was given, aligning data collection with global privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
We developed and applied a set of purpose-specific triggers—C0001 through C0005—covering all major dimensions of enterprise data governance:
- C0001: Data Privacy Management – Automated compliance with regional and global privacy frameworks.
- C0002: Consent Management – Centralized user consent handling across web properties.
- C0003: Vendor Risk Management – Maintained accountability and compliance for all third-party data processors.
- C0004: Incident Response – Enabled efficient breach notification protocols and regulatory reporting.
- C0005: Data Governance – Supported secure data discovery, classification, and lifecycle controls.
By applying these consent triggers throughout the GTM infrastructure, we created a controlled environment for data collection, ensuring only permissioned data was captured, without disrupting the user experience.
Once OneTrust was fully integrated, the client transitioned to GA4’s blended data modeling approach. This shift allowed analytics to include modeled data from users who declined tracking—bridging gaps left by missing identifiers like cookies or User IDs. As a result, the client could still derive insights from a broader dataset while respecting user privacy preferences.
To improve attribution fidelity further, we isolated login traffic by creating a custom event that excluded existing user activity from prospect behavior reporting. We also activated referral tracking for traffic originating from AI assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini, capturing a previously invisible segment of inbound visits.
The implementation of Google’s Consent Mode V2 via OneTrust delivered measurable impact:
- Direct traffic dropped by 43%, indicating that misattributed sessions were now properly reassigned to their true sources.
- Organic traffic increased by 15%, driven by improved crawlability and accurate attribution.
- Unassigned traffic fell by 68%, reflecting cleaner consent-based data collection and tag execution.
Final Thoughts
The intersection of privacy and performance is no longer a future concern. It is already shaping how ad platforms work, how data is collected, and how marketers measure success.
Google Consent Mode v2 and proper cookie consent implementation are now essential for any business that wants to maintain full functionality in its marketing stack—especially if it serves users in the EEA or handles personal data.
By investing in consent infrastructure today, you are protecting both your marketing performance and your long-term compliance. It is a move that safeguards your brand, improves your data quality, and positions your team to operate with confidence in an increasingly regulated environment.
The rules have changed. But with the right systems in place, your ability to drive performance does not have to.
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Ishaan Bhardwaj
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