Google Tag Manager: How to Install Consent Studio

Follow these steps to install the Consent Studio Consent Management Platform on Google Tag Manager

After completing the following steps, you will have a Google Tag Manager container set-up with Consent Overview enabled and have the Consent Studio CMP installed with basic settings.

1. Prepare your Google Tag Manager container

Have a GTM Container ready

First things first: you need to have set-up a Google Tag Manager container and installed it on your website. This article from the official Google documentation will help you do this.

Enable Consent Overview

The Consent Overview page provides a high level view of all the consent settings across the tags in your container and helps you adjust them for individual tags.

Consent Overview is not enabled by default on your Google Tag Manager container. Enable it using these instructions from the official Google documentation.

2. Installation of Consent Studio

Log in at the Consent Studio dashboard. If you do not yet have an account, you can create one here.

Create an account

In the top navigation of the dashboard, open the Web CMP dropdown and click on Install Consent Studio.

On the installation page, click Next to get the questionnaire. Answer the questions of the guide.

• To get the GTM Tag Template recommendation, answer Yes to "Are you using Google Tag Manager?". Then either answer No to "Are you comfortable editing your website's code, and do you have access to do so?", or choose Google Tag Manager under "Do you have a preference for installation?".

• No preference leads to Code.

Next, add our Google Tag Manager tag template (Consent Studio CMP) from the Template Gallery to the GTM container that is active on the domain that you have registered with Consent Studio.

• The Tag Manager Template can be found by clicking on Install Tag Template or through the following link: https://tagmanager.google.com/gallery/#/owners/vallonic/templates/consent-studio-gtm-template

• Instructions on how to add a tag to your GTM container can be found here: https://support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/9454109?hl=en

When you have added the template to the relevant GTM container, open the Tags tab, click New and add the Consent Studio CMP tag to the Tag Manager container. The trigger must be Consent Initialization - All Pages.

Google Consent Mode v2

Trigger for the "Consent Studio CMP" tag

When you install Consent Studio through Google Tag Manager, use the “Consent Initialization - All Pages” trigger for the Consent Studio CMP tag.

With this setup, the Consent Mode defaults are only set once GTM itself has loaded. If Monitoring shows Google Consent Mode Load Order, switch to the Code path: place the Installation Code directly in the <head>, before GTM, and remove the Consent Studio CMP tag from GTM. See Google Consent Mode Load Order.

Basic and advanced consent mode

Implementing Consent Mode v2 can be divided in two approaches:

• Basic

• Advanced

With the basic approach, you will block specific tags until a consent update allows them to load. You can achieve this with the cookie_consent_update event (or one of our specific events) that ships with Consent Studio.

With the advanced approach, you will load them nevertheless. However, the tags will adapt to the actual consent states and change their behavior accordingly. You can then use the All Pages trigger that is available in Google Tag Manager.

How to set-up basic consent mode

As the basic approach of consent mode entails that tags are not loaded at all until consent has been provided for a specific category, we will leverage the built in dataLayer events of Consent Studio to achieve this.

• For tags that you only want to load when consent has been provided for the "functional" consent category, the event that you may use is called cookie_consent_granted_functional;

• For tags that you only want to load when consent has been provided for the "analytics" consent category, the event that you may use is called cookie_consent_granted_analytics.

• For tags that you only want to load when consent has been provided for the "marketing" consent category, the event that you may use is called cookie_consent_granted_marketing.

To create a new custom event trigger (cited from Google's documentation):

1. Open the Triggers panel in your Google Tag Manager container and click New.

2. Click Trigger Configuration and choose the Custom Event trigger type.

3. Enter an event name. This should be any of the event names provided above.

How to set-up advanced consent mode

Implementing advanced consent mode is, ironically, simpler, as you will load tags as you normally should, based on the trigger that best suits your use case. This could be the All Pages trigger, for instance.

Note that not every tag that you install in your Tag Manager container may respect the consent signals provided by Consent Studio through Google Consent Mode. If you are unsure, it might be best to use basic consent mode for these tags and not load them at all until consent has been provided by the visitor for the specific tag.

Frequently asked questions

How do I get rid of the ?_gl=1* parameter that is automatically being added in my page's URLs?

You can disable the automatic addition of this parameter by disabling the Enable URL Passthrough option in the Consent Studio Google Tag Manager template.