Consent mode & Tag assistant verification

  • Resolved Lyk

    (@lyk-1)


    5 months ago

    Hello,

    I would like to know how could one verify that the consent mode signals are working as they should.

    Normally, we can visit the site through tagassistant.google.com and it will show the events, consent signals, etc.
    Tried with CAOS and Asynchronous mode, but event though I get the message:

    Tag Assistant Connected

    Debug information for this page is viewable in the Tag Assistant window

    no info is shown in tag assistant.
    It also mentions:
    “To improve the quality of your testing, enable your Tag Manager container for debugging in the Tag Assistant window, then return here.”
    but the tracking is only through GA4. This message I think normally appear if a site uses Google Tag Assistant.

    The setup is using CookieYes. CAOS is initially setup as “Always Allow tracking” so that CookieYes will find the cookies on the initial scan. Afterwards, I switch it to track only when analytics_storage is granted.

    Verify that the consent signal are sent is very important for everyone I guess. So how could we verify that?

    Thank you!

    PS: with the “minimal” version, tagassistant cannot recognise anything. But I guess this is probably expected.

    PS2: Also, the CaosGtag_ga* cookies are actually the ga cookies?

    • This topic was modified 5 months ago by Lyk.
Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Plugin Author DaanvandenBergh

    (@daanvandenbergh)

    Hi!

    Sorry to have kept you waiting for a response. Due to a family emergency I wasn’t able to reply sooner.

    The easiest way to verify if consent is working properly, is by using your browser’s Dev Tools (press F12 in your browser to open it) and browse to the Network tab.

    At first pageload (before consent) you should see a single “ping” to Google’s servers. This is a so-called “cookieless ping” and contains no user information, they’re strictly sent for basic measurement and modeling purposes. (source)

    Once consent is given, another request should be sent to Google’s servers, contain much more information.

    If no consent is given, it’ll only sent the cookieless pings on each pageload.

    Hope that helps!

    Thread Starter Lyk

    (@lyk-1)

    Hello Daan,

    I have noticed that you always answer promptly and guessed you would have probably been extra busy. Sorry to hear that, hope everything/everyone is well now!

    With the method you suggested, I can see some requests to google-analytics.com/g/collect? but cannot differentiate pingless from consented requests. Also (I think) there is no way to tell whether the different consent parameters are passed correctly, e.g. analytics: granted, etc.

    Thank you!

    Plugin Author DaanvandenBergh

    (@daanvandenbergh)

    Hi again!

    Can you share your site’s URL? If you don’t want to share it here, please send it to me using this contact form.

    Thread Starter Lyk

    (@lyk-1)

    Hello!

    Ok, I just sent you an email via the form. Will update this thread when we reach some conclusion.

    Thank you!

    Plugin Author DaanvandenBergh

    (@daanvandenbergh)

    Okay, so I had to dig into this for a minute, because I forgot how to tell the difference.

    The difference is in the gcs parameter in the URL of each request to Google Analytics:

    • When rejecting the Cookie Notice, you’ll notice that it’s set to G100, which means denied. And also, CAOS will not set any cookies for Google Analytics. These requests will be treated as cookieless pings, Google says.
    • When accepting, it’s set to G111, which means accepted.

    I just tested it on your site, and it’s working properly.

    Enjoy!

    Thread Starter Lyk

    (@lyk-1)

    Hello Daan,

    Sorry for the super late verification, thought I had replied in the thread.
    That seems correct and the gcs changes as needed. The only thing a bit weird is that I couldn’t find any official google documentation on these parameters, only unofficial references from articles/blogs.

    If you have any official sources feel free to share them, I believe others would be interested too.
    Other than that, thank you very much for you help! (maybe add a reference to your FAQ regading gcs and gcd parameters)

    Cheers!

    Plugin Author DaanvandenBergh

    (@daanvandenbergh)

    Hi!

    No problem. The gcs parameter is mentioned in the link I shared earlier, but you’re right, the meaning of the values seems to be nowhere in the official documentation. That being said, there’s a lot of things currently undocumented in the GA4 (dev) docs.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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