How Consent Mode V2 Is Hiding 80% of Your Google Ads Conversions

Consent Mode V2 actually gives us a real opportunity to flip the script. So I mean, shifting the focus away from generating like high volume of leads at a low cost, and instead focusing on things like cost per qualified lead pipeline, and return on investment.

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Welcome back to the B2B Performance Marketing Podcast. If your cost per lead suddenly shot up over the past 12 months, it’s probably nothing to do with your ads and more to do with your tracking. It’s been a full year since Google’s consent mode V2 was implemented, and that means we’ve got 12 months worth of data, which paints a really clear picture around how it’s impacted the advertising landscape. In this episode, we’re going to be covering what consent mode V2 is why it’s pushed cost per conversion up. What you can do to limit the damage. Why you are taking a risk if you don’t have it in place, and how you can put it in place effectively while managing expectations with the board. So let’s dive in.

I guess the first thing to clarify is what Google consent mode V2 actually is. Other than a bit of a mouthful, because if you Google it, you’re gonna find two different things being talked about. The first one is a bit more technical because actually Google consent mode V2 is an upgrade to the way that Google handles cookie consent. But when it was announced, it came with a deadline to be implemented by, and I think for that reason, Google consent mode or consent mode V2 has kind of been adopted for this whole concept of making your tracking consent compliant. And it’s the second definition really, that we’re gonna be talking about today.

And just a thought here, if you are wondering whether your Google Ads are consent mode compliant, let’s quickly cover off how you can check. First step: go ahead and open up Google Ads in your browser. Click goals in the nav bar down the left hand side. Then just under the headline where it says summary, you’re going to see two different tabs here. Goals and diagnostics. Go ahead and click into diagnostics. If you’ve set up consent mode V2 here, you’re going to see a pane that says your consent mode is active. Yeah, that’s great thinking Miley. And if you’re unsure that consent mode is set up in your ads, it’s definitely a good idea to go and check.

So let’s cover what consent mode V2 means in real terms. It’s a bit of a tongue twister, but consent mode V2 is basically a privacy initiative for businesses in the European economic area, which includes the uk. It came with a deadline to be implemented by March, 2024, and by that deadline, businesses needed to make sure that when a visitor to their website. Consented to cookies, that consent was passed back to Google as permission to process their data. And by processing the data, I mean counting conversions and building remarketing audiences, things like that.

And as you’ve probably figured out, all of this consent is controlled by the cookie banner on your website. If a user consents, Google can process that data. However, if they deny cookies or ignore the banner, Google can’t. In our experience, up to 80% of users. Deny or ignore cookies in the worst case, on the flip side, that means that only 20% of conversions are getting measured. So it doesn’t actually mean that ads are underperforming, it’s just that we’re only seeing 20% of the picture from a conversion perspective.

Let’s put that into real terms. Losing that data has a major side effect. It makes the cost per conversion of ads go up exponentially as soon as you put consent mode on. And we know firsthand that this has put so much pressure on a lot of marketers. Everybody trusts numbers since they’re objective. But now these numbers are subjective since they’re not painting the full picture anymore.

So let’s dive into how this all stacks up. Both spend and clicks are fully tracked since they happen in Google, but conversions aren’t since they happen on your website and Google doesn’t own your website and it needs this consent in order to track them. Before any consent based tracking, Google was able to track almost all of the conversions that happened on your site, but now in most cases, it only has consent to track the minority of them. This means that it skews both the measured cost per conversion and your conversion rates. Since your cost per conversion is your cost, which stayed the same, divided by the number of conversions, which have now massively dropped, this means that your measurable cost per lead now looks so much worse.

Measurable is the key word here. Since it’s no longer the number of leads you’re getting. But the number of leads you’re able to measure, which will be higher in reality than what you’re seeing on your Google ads. So to reiterate Louise’s point here, this doesn’t mean that your campaigns are underperforming, just that fewer conversions are being reported than you are actually getting. So to frame that just a little bit, it’s almost like before consent mode, Google was going, I’m gonna go and try and claim as many conversions as I can see, and now it’s still doing that. It’s just that the number of conversions that it can see are a lot less. So, whereas before Google Ads was probably over attributing on the leads that it was generating, and now it’s very much under reporting or that’s what we’re seeing with our clients anyway.

So let’s dive in and see what we can do about it. The first step here is gonna be making sure we can get as much consent data as we possibly can. Lots of data is simply lost by people ignoring your cookie banner. Where we often see this is a big issue is where there’s a tiny banner hiding in the top, the bottom, or the corner of the screen. So if you are thinking, yeah, that’s exactly what they’re like on our website, then this definitely applies to you.

So let’s cover how to fix this. Here. You should be using a full screen takeover banner that forces people to make a decision to either consent or deny the cookies. Since they’re not gonna be able to access the website before they do one of these things. Now, even if people deny your cookies, they should still be able to access your website. And please don’t add in so much information to the banner that it physically scares people away. Keep it brief and to the point with an option to read more. The goal here is to make sure that people choose one way or another to consent or to deny. Don’t let ignore be an option.

Now, this next bit is something that I usually use Google Tag Manager for, but I’m not sure if this is the right place to go into heavy technical detail. So we’ll keep it top line for now. But if you would like the detail in a future episode, you can pop a request through on our website at webmarketeruk.com/topic. So Miley just ran through some of our top tips on gathering as much consent as possible. The next step, which is just as important, is to make sure that that consent is being passed back to Google now and again, I see businesses that completely stop Google Tag Manager from loading until consent is granted.

Now, that is probably an option, but it’s also probably the most nuclear one. You can stop tags from firing within Google Tag Manager based on whether or not they’ve granted consent, and that’s the approach that I’d recommend doing here. You just need to make sure that your tags are configured to capture that consent and send it back. It’s also really strongly recommended to set up enhanced conversions and your Google Ads, but that’s a big subject and we’ll dive into that in the future.

Yeah, that’s a good shout. This is already becoming a beefy topic, and that’s coming from a vegetarian. So another recommendation here is to figure out exactly how much data that you’re losing from your cookie banner. At the top of the episode, we mentioned that up to 80% of your conversions might be going untracked. The actual percentage here is different for everyone.

So here’s how you can go in and work out what that percentage is for you. Consent management platforms or CMPs are the things that create the cookie banners and pass consent to Google. Now, lots of CMPs will show you how many people visited your website, and in some cases it’ll even show you the number of people that accepted or denied cookies. But for the CMPs that don’t give you that data, you want to take the number of visitors that you can see in Google Analytics, and then divide that by the number of visits that’s showing in your CMP. This will give you the actual percentage of visitors that you are able to measure.

Okay, so full disclosure, we hit a few technical snags and we’re having to rerecord this last little bit. So if you’re watching the video version of the podcast, you’ll probably notice an outfit change as well as a location change for Miley. Uh, but just to explain that for you. So, uh, so yeah, Miley, as you were. Now following on from what past Milan said here. While this is far from a perfect science, you can use this to illustrate the situation to your board.

That’s great. Thanks for clarifying there. Future Miley, the final recommendation that we have follows on from what we discussed last episode. You want to make sure that you’ve got everything that you need set up so that you can identify those leads from your Google Ads in your CRM. At the moment, we’re seeing a lot more leads from Google Ads in the actual CRM than on the ads platform itself. So without doing this, you are at a real risk of undercounting the number of leads generated from your ads.

And to stay on that point a little bit, consent mode V2 actually gives us a real opportunity to flip the script. So I mean, shifting the focus away from generating like high volume of leads at a low cost and instead focusing on things like cost per qualified lead pipeline and return on investment. Absolutely. That is such an important point.

Now as promised, we’re going to cover why you’re taking a risk if you haven’t already put this in place and how you can put it in place effectively while also managing expectations with the board. Now, on the plus side, if you haven’t got consent mode V2 set up just yet. Then you probably haven’t experienced an increase in cost per lead that we’ve been talking about. On the negative side, Google Ads is actively spot checking accounts and where it’s spots that consent mode isn’t in place. Then it’s just disabling them and recovering disabled ad accounts can be a royal pain in the backside. So our advice here, if you’re already advertising in the European economic area, is to get this sorted as soon as possible.

That’s great. Thanks, Miley. Now let me just cover managing expectations with the board to wrap things up. So this is done by basically just running through everything that we’ve discussed in this episode, but you’re gonna be doing it proactively rather than retrospectively. And if I was gonna recommend a process, it would be the same one we used with our clients when we saw that the consent mode deadline was coming down the tracks.

And that goes a little something like this. So step one, you’re gonna explain what consent mode V2 is and why it exists. Step two, you’re gonna want to explain the risks of not getting it implemented. Our disabled Google Ads account. Step three is that you want manage expectations that your cost per lead will increase because you’re not gonna be able to measure as many. Step four is all of the recommendations that you need to look at, which is improving your cookie banner, improving your Google Tag Manager setup, improving your CRM integration, and also exploring getting enhanced conversions in place. And then finally, step five, which is optional but recommended is that you’re gonna monitor the percentage of traffic that you’re losing through denied or ignored cookies.

And I think that’s a great recap to end on. We are on a mission to remove the smoke and mirrors from the B2B advertising world. So if you found this useful, please leave us a review. It’s incredibly helpful for us. If you’ve got a burning question or a challenge that you’re facing at the moment, you can actually request a topic for the podcast. Just head to web marketer uk.com/topic and send us a message. We read every single one. So from the both of us. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll look forward to catching you on the next episode.