The most commonly asked question over the past year has been “Is the cookie banner a must?”

• A cookie consent banner is mandatory since you are going to add a cookie to the terminal of the user. On the other hand, based on the ePrivacy Directive if you’re going to track users individually you must request consent as well.
• If you’re running Google Ads, Facebook Ads,… as they use cookies you must add a cookie consent banner on your website, even if you’re not using SEAL as a full alternative to Google Analytics.
• GDPR cookie consent is the most commonly known by marketers. But the regulation that really talks about cookie consent is the ePrivacy Regulation.

The regulation is crystal clear about cookie consent banners. Both ePrivacy Directive and GDPR have clear requirements when it comes to cookie banners:

• Reject All button.
• If a user rejects cookies or doesn’t accept, cookies must be blocked. The user must be able to enjoy the content of the website.
• Analytics and Marketing cookies must be unchecked by default. Users must activate analytics & marketing cookies themselves.
• The meaning of ‘Accepts cookies’: When a user accepts cookies they accept that you track them individually and that you add a cookie in their user terminal.
• Cookie Consent Example: You’ll see the following buttons: accept, configuration and reject all.

Obviously a cookie consent banner must be correctly implemented.

Run a quick check with SEAL’s FREE cookie scanner to know which cookies are added in your terminal without consent.

Google consent mode consists of Google calculating how much traffic your website is getting without accepting cookies. And it does not let you avoid cookie consent banners.

You must take into consideration that:

Nowadays Google Analytics Consent Mode for GA4 is not working correctly because:

• GCM is sending ghost hits to Google’s servers when a user rejects cookies.
• GCM creates the complete journey of a user that has accepted cookies once they accept cookies after a few page views. For example, if you visit a website and don’t accept cookies, you visit 3 more pages and then accept cookies. GCM has stored the navigation of the user even before they accepted cookies.

Nowadays the best companies are taking this data very seriously, so every day more companies have 2 different tracking systems. They are still using Google Analytics, but complement this data with SEAL Metrics.

Nowadays SEAL Metrics can be the only web analytics platform for our clients, but it’s totally compatible with other web analytics, like GA4.

Your business data can’t depend on a single partner that is under the eye of the EU and is not tracking 100% of your traffic.