Consent mode (v2)
Consent mode is the API that tells Google tags what a visitor consented to. Version 2 added two signals, required for EEA ads measurement since March 2024.
Your consent banner (CMP) passes four flags to Google's tags. Since March 2024, Google requires the two v2 signals for ads measurement and audience features covering EEA users.
| Signal | What it gates |
|---|---|
ad_storage | Advertising cookies (reading and writing) |
analytics_storage | Analytics cookies and identifiers |
ad_user_data (v2) | Sending user data to Google for advertising |
ad_personalization (v2) | Personalized ads and remarketing |
#Basic vs advanced
Consent mode ships in two implementations, and the choice decides what happens to your numbers. Basic blocks Google tags entirely until consent. A denied visitor simply vanishes, and conversion counts drop by roughly your denial rate. Advanced sends cookieless, unidentified pings for denied visitors, which Google feeds into conversion modeling, so part of that loss returns as modeled estimates in your reports. Many CMP default configurations quietly make this choice for you.
Deploying v2, including the basic-vs-advanced call, is covered in Consent Mode v2 without losing your signal.
Related terms
Cookieless tracking
Cookieless tracking is measurement that doesn't depend on third-party cookies: first-party data, server-side events, hashed-identifier matching, and modeled conversions.
Third-party cookies
Third-party cookies are cookies set by a domain other than the one you're visiting: the basis of cross-site ad targeting, blocked by Safari and Firefox, kept by Chrome.