Google Requires Consent Mode V2 for EEA Traffic

What Changed

Consent Mode is how a website tells Google's tags whether a visitor has agreed to cookies and data use. It originally had two settings: whether ad cookies could be stored, and whether analytics cookies could be stored. Version 2, introduced ahead of the change below, added two more: ad_user_data, consent for sending a person's data to Google for advertising, and ad_personalization, consent for personalized advertising such as remarketing.^1,2

From March 2024, Google required advertisers using its tags and SDKs for traffic from the European Economic Area to collect consent from those users and pass it to Google, as part of stricter enforcement of its EU user consent policy.³ The timing matched the EU's Digital Markets Act, under which Google, as a designated "gatekeeper", had to comply with new rules on combining people's data across its services from early March 2024.⁴

Without the new signals, Google limited what it would do with EEA users' data. Personalized advertising and remarketing required affirmative consent, so audiences built from Google Analytics data used in linked ad products would include only users outside the EEA, and Customer Match lists could degrade.^5,3 Search Engine Journal summarized the stakes for advertisers: without Consent Mode v2, they would lose remarketing and audience personalization for European users.²

Consent Mode can run in two ways. In basic mode, Google's tags don't load until the visitor makes a choice, and send nothing if they decline. In advanced mode, the tags load straight away and, while consent is denied, send cookieless pings that Google uses to model the conversions it can't observe, with a model specific to the advertiser rather than a general one.⁶

Why It Mattered

For advertisers in Europe, measurement and remarketing on Google now depended on the consent banner working correctly. Sites could use one of Google's consent management platform partners to send the new signals; sites with their own banners had to implement Consent Mode v2 themselves.³

It also made modelled data a larger part of reporting. Where visitors decline, Google Ads reports conversions it has estimated rather than observed, which is useful for bidding but harder to reconcile with an advertiser's own sales data. Consent requirements had existed since GDPR; Consent Mode v2 turned them into a technical condition for using Google's ad tools.