Consent Mode v2 for Online Stores: What to Set Up and Verify

Consent Mode is a way to tell Google what a visitor chose about cookies, so that advertising and analytics tags behave accordingly. For an online store three things depend on it: whether you see purchases in Google Ads, whether remarketing works and how complete your GA4 reports are. Set consent up wrongly and part of your buyers vanish from the statistics, while your ad campaigns learn from incomplete data.

4

consent signals in Consent Mode v2

two of them were added in version 2

700

ad clicks in 7 days

the minimum for conversion modeling, per country and domain

2

implementation modes

basic and advanced

Who needs it

Google’s consent rules concern visitors from the European Economic Area. According to Google Ads Help, to keep using tags for measurement, ad personalization and remarketing, an advertiser has to collect consent and share its status with Google. If you run your own banner, you need to implement Consent Mode v2 specifically.

In practice: if your buyers and ad campaigns are only in Ukraine, Google’s obligations most likely do not apply to you. If the store sells to EU countries, targets ads at Europe or gets noticeable European traffic, you need to set consent up. Legal questions (what counts as consent, which banners are acceptable) belong with a lawyer; here we cover the technical side only.

Four signals

Parameter	What it controls
ad_storage	advertising cookies: when denied, new advertising cookies are not set
analytics_storage	analytics cookies and storage for analytics
ad_user_data	whether user data may be sent to Google for advertising
ad_personalization	whether ads may be personalized, including remarketing

The last two, ad_user_data and ad_personalization, arrived in version 2 (November 2023). In practice they are the ones people forget: the banner passes only ad_storage and analytics_storage, and advertising features in the EEA are still limited.

Basic or advanced

The mode decides what happens to tags before a visitor answers the banner, and what happens if they decline.

	Basic	Advanced
Tags before an answer	blocked until the user interacts with the banner	load immediately, consent defaults to denied
If the user declines	nothing is sent, not even the consent status	tags send measurements without cookies
Conversion modeling in Google Ads	a general model, less detailed	an advertiser-specific model

Google states that measurements without cookies are not used to track individual users, build remarketing lists or create profiles. Our choice for a store running paid ads at the EU is advanced, because it gives more precise modeling. But whether such data exchange before consent is acceptable under privacy law is for your lawyer to decide, not Google’s documentation.

Conversion modeling: what it takes

When a visitor declines cookies, Google estimates conversions with models and shows them in reports next to observed ones. According to Google Ads Help, this requires:

• a correct Consent Mode (or TCF v2.0) implementation;
• at least 700 ad clicks over 7 days per country and domain grouping.

The modeling status usually appears in conversion diagnostics within 48 hours, sometimes up to two weeks. The uplift is shown for four weeks, and for it to appear Consent Mode must have run for at least 7 full days. A small store with a budget below the threshold will not get modeling, and it is better to account for that risk up front.

Where it usually breaks in an online store

This is our practical assessment of the typical failure points, not Google’s requirements:

1. There is a banner, but no default command. Tags start before the consent state is set.
2. Tags fire before the answer. For asynchronous consent tools Google recommends the wait_for_update parameter, which gives time to call the update before tags run.
3. Not all four signals are passed. Often only two are mapped, while ad_user_data and ad_personalization stay unset.
4. The choice is not stored. Google explicitly advises persisting the answer so that later pages set the right state.
5. Checkout on another domain or subdomain. Verify that the consent state reaches the payment step, because that is where the purchase is recorded.
6. No verification. Tag Assistant is enough: before interaction with the banner the On-page Default should read Denied, and after consent On-page Update should read Granted.

The Shopify specifics

Shopify’s help center says directly: event data sent to Google from customers in the EEA will not be used for personalized advertising unless Consent Mode v2 is activated and valid consent is obtained. A third-party banner has to be connected to Shopify’s customer privacy settings, and for a custom pixel the Consent Mode snippet is added manually. On other platforms the principle is the same: consent has to reach the tags as four signals.

Implementation order

1. 1
   Regions and mode
   where consent is needed, basic or advanced
   ↓ →
2. 2
   Banner or CMP
   covering all four signals
   ↓ →
3. 3
   Defaults
   denied for regions, wait_for_update for asynchronous tools
   ↓ →
4. 4
   Consent update
   after the user chooses, persisted across pages
   ↓ →
5. 5
   Verification
   Tag Assistant and modeling status in Google Ads

Sources: Google Tag Platform, Google Analytics Help; the order of steps is ours

An example from our own site

On this site the default is granted for all regions except EEA countries, the United Kingdom and Switzerland: for those it defaults to denied, and only they see a banner. The visitor’s choice is passed with an update command. This is a decision for a services site with a mostly Ukrainian audience. For a store with European buyers the setup may need to be stricter, and it is worth choosing it together with a lawyer.

What to do next

It is best to plan consent before ads start rather than after the statistics are already distorted. If you are preparing campaigns for a store, Google Ads setup and management together with a measurement check is usually cheaper than fixing the data afterwards.

Need your Consent Mode reviewed? Get in touch: we will look at the tags, the modeling status and tell you what to fix first.

Author: Sergey Filatyev, founder of the Veb-Dev boutique studio.