This is the fifth in our series of eight data engineering and insights articles where we shine a light on the technical challenges that arise when implementing a CMP.
Adopting Google’s Consent Mode requires you to re-evaluate your approach to compliance and implementation - so how can you make the best use of Google’s ecosystem without violating privacy rules?
Why do we need consent management?
Data privacy regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and state-level data privacy laws in the United States have reshaped how organisations collect, store and process data. Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) are essential tools in helping organisations remain compliant with this legislation.
The technical challenges of implementing a CMP ... and how to overcome them
1. Compatibility with existing systems
One of the first technical hurdles in implementing a CMP is ensuring compatibility with an organisation’s existing systems, such as Digital Experience Platform (DXP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms, advertising networks and analytics tools. CMPs need to interface with a wide array of systems, each with its own data structures, APIs and workflows. Achieving seamless integration requires a deep understanding of both the CMP and the existing systems.
2. Data quality and non-compliance
Introducing a CMP into a website can often lead to data quality and privacy compliance issues. Common faults include failures in privacy compliance where data collection does not correctly reflect visitor consent choices or data quality issues in web analytics. This includes broken tracking or lost marketing attribution data. The traditional approach to implementing consent - blocking all data collection where no consent is given - can create a considerable data black hole, depending upon the proportion of the website’s audience that is withholding consent.
3. Data privacy and security
A website’s CMP is normally the gateway that allows or blocks numerous scripts and cookies on a website. Each script may be attempting to collect numerous data points. This can include sensitive data such as IP addresses, device identifiers, personal data and user preferences. On top of ensuring that scripts are allowed or blocked in respect of visitor choice, you also need to ensure against data leakage. And you need to ensure that any personal data has been encrypted to protect it from unauthorised access. Some additional measures you may need to take include: configuration of server-side tracking to control the specific data points that are being sent to advertising platforms; and ensuring that personal data used for enhanced conversions is being encrypted.
4. User experience
A poorly designed cookie banner can be an instant turn-off and a source of frustration or distrust for your visitors. As a result, they may never return to your otherwise carefully-crafted website. So it's crucial that you invest as much effort in polishing the user experience of your cookie banner and consent preference selection as you would your website. This means ensuring that your banner is clear, non-intrusive and gives visitors unbiased control over how their data is going to be collected and used without compromising the overall experience. For optimal results, don’t forget to check that your banner meets accessibility standards and test that the consent experience is equally as fluid on mobile as it is on desktop.
5. Performance impact
A CMP introduces additional scripts, network requests and data processing tasks to a website or application. This could impact site performance leading to longer load times, compromising user experience and leading to higher bounce rates. You'll need to take care that CMP scripts are correctly loaded before any cookie-setting scripts, including those introduced by your website, not just your tag management software. And you'll need to check that visitor consent is captured before non-essential scripts are executed and cookies set based upon their choices. Don’t forget to check that your CMP’s requests are not being blocked by your website’s Content Security Policy, and that consent is being correctly persisted across your site or subdomains. Finally, check any autoblocking features are working with all non-essential technologies on your site, not just those that are detected out of the box.
6. Compliance with evolving regulations
Data privacy regulations are constantly evolving, so your CMP must be adaptable enough to keep up with these changes, particularly where you may be operating in multiple jurisdictions with varying legal requirements. Ensure that any CMP you choose is regularly updated to comply with new or changing regulations - which you will of course need to test before rolling out. Additionally, your CMP should enable you to meet the different consent requirements for different regions and provide audit trails that document when and how consent was obtained, modified or withdrawn.
7. Scalability
Aside from the impact that a CMP can have on a website’s load speed, large organisations need to consider the scalability of their CMP solution. Storing millions of consent records requires scalable data solutions that may need to be queried in response to data subject access requests. For high-traffic websites, your CMP needs to be able to distribute load across multiple servers or data centres (known as load balancing) or even allow you to deploy the CMP in different geographic locations to reduce latency and comply with local data residency requirements.
Breaking from tradition with Consent Mode
We have already mentioned that data privacy regulations are constantly evolving, but so are approaches to data collection in response. Working with clients in highly-regulated sectors, we are familiar with businesses requiring high levels of data privacy compliance. This often means a very traditional approach to managing consent on a website, often referred to as 'no consent, no tracking'.
No consent, no tracking
'No consent, no tracking' does exactly what it says on the tin; no non-essential scripts are launched / cookies set without a visitor’s explicit consent to those cookie groups. This approach ensures maximum compliance with data privacy regulation; however, it has a flip-side... it also has the maximum impact upon data collection. As data privacy regulations and good practice has tightened over time, this approach has led to an increasing data gap. And this hinders your ability to get insight about your customers and the effectiveness of your digital marketing.
It's also a big problem for companies like Google or Facebook whose businesses are built on the back of paid advertising. Quite simply, they need you to see that paid advertising works so that you will buy more of it. As a result, advertising vendors are adapting their technologies to provide new, privacy-safe ways of collecting data to bridge this data gap.
Consent Mode v2: dynamic adjusting data collection based on user consent
If Google Analytics and Google Ads are critical tools in your data arsenal, Consent Mode v2 is a recent innovation to Google’s tracking technology that will play a significant role in your cookie compliance going forward.
Unlike a 'no consent, no tracking'-style implementation where no scripts are launched / cookies set until consent is granted, with Consent Mode v2, even without explicit consent, there is collection of some non-personal, aggregated, anonymised data. This is used to measure general trends and improve the accuracy of paid advertising reporting through applying Google’s machine learning algorithms. Consent Mode does this by dynamically adjusting the behaviour of your Google tags based on the consent status provided by a visitor. This means that if a visitor doesn’t provide consent for analytics or ad-related cookies the tags are automatically adapted to respect those preferences.
This helps organisations retain partial insights that would otherwise have been lost without violating privacy rules. However, it is important to understand how this distinctly different approach to data collection works. Your compliance team will need to clearly communicate how Consent Mode v2 enables you to collect data whilst still respecting visitor consent if you introduce it for Google’s tags or any other vendors that leverage this approach in the future.
Conclusion
Implementing a CMP is a critical step for organisations seeking to comply with data privacy regulations. By addressing common challenges such as compatibility with your existing systems, impacts on data quality and compliance, data security, user experience and scalability, you can successfully implement a CMP that meets legal requirements whilst fostering trust with your users.
Data privacy and data collection are evolving in response to each other and if you have not done so already, leveraging innovations such as Google’s Consent Mode can help fill the intelligence gap resulting from visitors withholding consent in a privacy-safe way.
Not implemented your Consent Management Platform yet? Concerned that your implementation may not be compliant? Or that it's leaving with you a data black hole?
Mando Group can help. Contact us today to speak to one of our experts.
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