Consent Mode v2

Consent Mode v2 is a Google setting that changes how your Google tags behave based on whether a visitor has agreed to tracking.

When someone lands on your site, your cookie banner records their choice. Consent Mode v2 passes that choice to Google Ads and Google Analytics through two signals, ad_storage and analytics_storage, plus two newer ones for ad personalization and user data. If the visitor says no, your tags still fire but stop writing cookies and instead send anonymous, cookieless pings that Google uses to model the gap.

Say you run search ads to people in Germany. A visitor clicks, declines cookies, and buys anyway. Without Consent Mode, that sale is invisible to Google and your remarketing lists starve. With it wired up in advanced mode, Google still estimates the conversion and keeps your audiences populated.

Since March 2024 this is effectively mandatory if you want Google Ads remarketing and audience features to keep working for EEA and UK users, and that has not loosened in 2026. The catch is that installing a banner is not enough. Google needs the actual consent signals flowing, so a misconfigured setup silently degrades your audiences while everything looks fine on the surface.

No signal, no audiences. Wire it or watch your remarketing quietly go dark.