Consent Mode
Google's mechanism for adjusting how its tags behave according to the consent a visitor has given, and for modelling some of the conversions that consent refusals make unobservable.
Why it matters
In regions where it applies, it decides how much of your traffic is measurable at all. A consent banner added without it can remove a large share of click identifiers overnight.
What goes wrong
The measurement consequence is easy to miss because the responsibility usually sits with a legal or web team rather than with whoever owns the ad account. A banner ships, coverage drops, and the two events are rarely connected by anyone.
How to check it on your own account
Compare click identifier coverage by country. A sharp gap between consent regions and the rest is the signature.
Next to this
- Signal lossThe umbrella term for measurement getting harder: third-party cookie restrictions, shortened browser storage lifetimes, consent refusals, and platform privacy changes, all reducing the share of activity that can be observed and attributed.
- GCLIDGoogle AdsThe identifier Google appends to your landing page URL when someone arrives from an ad and auto-tagging is on.
- Match rateGoogle AdsThe share of your leads carrying something Google can join back to an ad click: a click identifier, or a usable email where enhanced conversions for leads is switched on.
The rest of this step
Measure this on your own data
The diagnostic reads a CRM export in your browser and reports your volume, your match rate and the spread between your leads against the thresholds in this glossary. Nothing is uploaded and no account is needed.