How Consent Mode works
Consent Mode sits between your consent banner and your Google tags. When a visitor accepts, tags fire normally and send full data. When a visitor declines, the tags do not simply switch off, they send cookieless, anonymous pings that carry no identifiers. Google then uses those pings plus aggregate behaviour to model the conversions it can no longer observe directly. The mechanism means you keep a measurement signal for bidding even from users who declined tracking, without storing personal identifiers for them.
Consent Mode v1 vs v2
Version 2 added two explicit signals, ad_user_data and ad_personalization, on top of the original analytics and ad storage flags. These tell Google whether the user consented to their data being sent for advertising and whether it can be used for personalisation. For advertisers serving users in the European Economic Area, passing these v2 signals became a condition for using features like remarketing audiences and full conversion measurement. Without them, audience lists stop growing and measurement degrades, so v2 is not optional for anyone with meaningful European traffic.
Basic vs advanced implementation
There are two implementation styles. Basic Consent Mode blocks the tags entirely until consent is granted, so declined users send nothing and modeling has less to work with. Advanced Consent Mode loads the tags in a restricted state and sends the anonymous pings even before or without consent, which gives the model far more signal to work from. Advanced generally recovers more conversions through modeling, at the cost of a more careful implementation and a clear privacy review, which is the trade most measurement-serious advertisers make deliberately.
How iClick implements Consent Mode
iClick implements Consent Mode v2 as the foundation of privacy-safe measurement, wiring the consent banner to pass all four signals correctly and favouring the advanced setup where a privacy review supports it. The rule is that consent signals are validated in the tag debugger before anyone trusts the reported numbers, because a misconfigured banner silently starves both bidding and audiences. Getting the plumbing right is what lets modeling and Enhanced Conversions do their jobs.
