I’ve decided to write a little something about consent mode so that all my clients can see it. It’ll be a handy link as things develop. Something everyone knows is the POPI Act (which is South African), but you also get GDPR (which is for the EU), and then the main one in America is the California Act. The Canada one’s also quite important in this context.
Those are obviously all English, and some of you are really interested in the ones I can read about. But all this to say the reason consent mode is important is because when someone comes to your site, if you can’t track that they came from Google Ads or Facebook or Instagram or organic, then you can’t tell what they did next. Maybe they went and bought something for a thousand dollars, and you want to know that.
I am of the opinion that I don’t need to know their gender and their age and the fact that they were on an iPhone or that they were drinking coffee on their porch in northern Free State when they did it, but I think it is helpful to know at least where they came from and maybe the day of the week and if it’s tied to any campaign. There’s just a reasonable one of my stuff to know. All that to say with consent mode, they’re tightening the screws on this one, and you need to probably this year get that kind of stuff right.
The more I’ve read, the more I’ve realised there are so many rabbit holes and there’s so much stuff that’s far beyond me and too much work. So companies have already offered solutions that you can just pay them $50/year and go ahead with using their solution. So far, I’ve only suggested one, and that’s purely because it got recommended to me, so there might be better ones out there. But I am using Iubenda, and I think for the price ($50/year) and for that peace of mind, it’s worth it.
You might say, “Well, we don’t use GDPR; we operate in different countries or most of our users don’t matter.” The logic for me suggesting you make GDPR happy is that if you get that right, you probably get consent in every country in terms of the same kind of legal stuff – what font is tracking, what’s YouTube doing in the background, what’s Google Analytics doing, what’s Google Tag Manager etc etc etc.
So yeah, $50/year, I think it’s worth it.