What is a CMP (Consent Management Platform)?
A CMP, or Consent Management Platform, is the tool that handles the whole consent job for you: showing the banner, recording what each visitor chose, and signalling that choice to your tracking so tags behave accordingly.
What a CMP actually does
Three things. It displays the cookie banner, it stores each visitor's choice as proof of consent, and it broadcasts that choice to your tags, usually through Consent Mode, so analytics and marketing only fire when allowed.
Do you need one?
If you set non-essential cookies and have EU or UK visitors, you need consent, and a CMP is the practical way to collect and respect it at scale. Small sites sometimes use a lightweight plugin instead, but anything handling real traffic benefits from a proper CMP that keeps consent records and integrates with Google Tag Manager.
Common options
- Dedicated CMPs like Cookiebot, OneTrust and Usercentrics.
- Platform plugins (WordPress, Shopify) that bundle a basic CMP.
- Google-certified CMPs, which matter if you run Google ads in the EU.
Whichever you pick, the test is the same: does it actually block tags until consent, and does it stop cookies on reject? A banner that does not is just decoration.
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