Installing Termly's Consent Management Platform is an easy way to configure your website to handle regulatory requirements such as the GDPR in the EU and CCPA in California, which now seek to give customers and users more control over how businesses handle their data when interacting online. The GDPR demands that websites give users a chance to either consent to cookies that can be used to track them, or refuse consent.
A CMP is designed to gain consent to use any form of data collection, or direct behavior tracking from a user who is visiting the website. Although requiring explicit consent can have an impact on a web-analytics platform's ability to provide insight to the website owner, properly configuring Termly's settings, and integrating Termly with Google Analytics' "Consent Mode" can improve the visibility into user behavior and traffic reporting, and mitigate the loss of insight.
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Read more about Termly's CMP.
As businesses transform their website configuration to comply with new regulations, they want to understand how their user analytics may be impacted. This article provides further detailed information about how a CMP could impact various aspects of site analytics and reporting, and what mitigation strategies can be used to reduce the impact of installing a CMP on your site.
Impact of Termly on website analytics and traffic reporting
Why does installing Termly (or any other CMP) impact analytics and traffic reporting?
Web-analytics platforms (such as Google Analytics) use tracking cookies and other methods to inform website owners about how users are interacting with their website, and provide other data such as visitor geolocation and biometric information such as age and gender. This allows website owners to assess how particular groups of users respond to a marketing campaign or new content. However, the GDPR protects citizens of the EU no matter where in the world they are connecting from, and also protects non-EU citizens when they are visiting or residing within the EU. When these protected individuals do not provide explicit consent, the website must block the web-analytics platforms's use of the tracking cookies and any other methods used to collect personal or sensitive data. This in-turn reduces the information that the web-analytics platform can provide to the website owner.
How much of an impact can installing Termly have?
The impact that installing a CMP will have on the reporting generated by your web-analytics platform depends on how many of your users opt out of the analytics cookies. The proportion of users that decline consent is a rough estimate of how much the reporting will be impacted.
If most of a website's traffic originates in the EU, where users must be opted out by default when they first land on the page and there needs to be a clear 'decline' option on the banner, then web-analytics may be impacted as much as 70-80%. However, if most of your traffic is outside of the EU, displaying a consent banner is not required in most cases, so users can be opted in by default, or only shown a consent banner with an 'accept' button. In this case the impact can be much lower, perhaps only 5-10%.
Web-analytics platforms can also be affected by other things than refusing consent via a CMP query. Some users may have ad-blocking plugins installed that block analytics and tracking scripts, and some browsers such as Firefox, Safari, and Brave block tracking cookies and tracking scripts by default.
Mitigation strategies to reduce the impact of installing Termly
There are a few things you can do to reduce the impact that installing a CMP has on your ability to maintain high quality website analytics and traffic reporting. To minimize the impact of installing a cookie banner on your analytics metrics, check out these mitigation strategies below:
1. Make use of geo-targeted banner settings
In regions where website users are not required to provide explicit consent, Termly can be configured to be less strict. This will make it more likely that your analytics cookies and scripts will be enabled and data collected.
Location based configuration options include:
Disable the cookie banner entirely for a specific region (not recommended)
Enable "opt-out" instead of "opt-in" for a specific region
Enable scroll-to-consent (implied consent) for a specific region
Disable the "preferences" button for a specific region
To adjust these settings go to your Termly Dashboard > Consent Management > Consent Banner settings > Consent settings.
2. Implement Google's Consent Mode (if using Google Analytics)
Google's "Consent Mode" allows you to adjust how Google Analytics and Ads behave depending on the consent preferences of each individual user, and can be directly integrated with Termly. When integrated, Google's products adjust their behavior, applying advanced data modeling tools instead of collecting data from the user. Without functional cookies, web-analytics platform tools such as Google Tag Manager (GTM) have a measurement gap and lose visibility into user behavior. However, results from Google indicate that their data modeling through Consent Mode recovers more than 70% of ad-click-to-conversions lost due to user cookie consent choices.
Termly offers a template that can communicate user consent preferences to GTM. As users visit your website, they configure their consent with Termly’s consent banner, and GTM is automatically adjusted to meet compliance, and web-analytics data is supplemented with aggregate data models.
Read more: How to use Google Consent Mode with Termly