What is tracking consent?
Tracking consent is the permission a visitor gives for you to use analytics and marketing cookies. It is now the gatekeeper for most of your measurement, so it is worth understanding properly.
What valid consent means
Under GDPR, consent must be freely given, specific, informed and a clear affirmative action. In plain terms: no pre-ticked boxes, a real reject option, and nothing fires until the person chooses. Scrolling or ignoring the banner is not consent.
Why it changes your numbers
Every visitor who declines is someone your tags cannot fully measure. Depending on your audience and banner, that can be anywhere from a few percent to a third or more of traffic. This is often why analytics drops after a cookie banner goes live: you are not losing visitors, you are losing permission to count some of them.
How to measure when people decline
You do not have to choose between compliance and data. Google Consent Mode lets tags run in a privacy-safe, cookieless mode on a decline, sending anonymous pings that Google uses to model the conversions you cannot directly see. Paired with server-side tracking, most businesses recover the bulk of their measurement while staying within the rules.
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