When a visitor hasn't agreed to cookiesA small piece of data stored in a user’s browser that helps websites remember user activity, preferences, or sessions across visits. yet, Google Analytics and Google Ads need to know what they're allowed to do. Google Consent Mode is how they find out, and Conversion Bridge lets you choose between Google's two ways of handling it: Basic and Advanced.
Where to find the setting
Go to Settings → Conversion Bridge → Options and scroll to the Cookie Consent section. The Google Consent Mode setting shows up once you've selected your cookie banner and turned on Google Analytics or Google Ads.
If you don't use a cookie banner, this setting doesn't apply. Google Analytics and Google Ads load and track normally.
Basic
With Basic, Google Analytics and Google Ads wait. Nothing loads and nothing is sent to Google until the visitor allows it in your cookie banner.
Each one waits for its own category:
- Google Analytics starts when the visitor allows analytics
- Google Ads starts when the visitor allows marketing
If a visitor allows only one of them, only that one runs. Once a visitor says yes, page views and conversions are tracked as usual, including any that happened on that page before they clicked.
Google Ads still fills in some of the conversions it misses from visitors who said no. It uses a general estimate based on patterns across many sites.
Advanced
With Advanced, Google Analytics and Google Ads load right away. For visitors who haven't said yes, page views and conversions are still sent to Google, but in a stripped-down form:
- no cookies are set or read, so Google can't connect one page to the next
- no customer details like email, name or phone number are sent
- the WordPress user ID and user properties aren't sent
Google uses these stripped-down hits to estimate the visits and conversions it can't fully see. Once the visitor says yes, everything after that is tracked normally.
How much this helps depends on the platform:
- Google Ads builds an estimate based on your own account's data, which is more accurate than the general estimate it uses in Basic.
- Google Analytics only fills in estimates for busy sites. Google requires at least 1,000 events a day from visitors who said no, for at least 7 days, plus at least 1,000 visitors a day who said yes on 7 of the last 28 days. On smaller sites, Google Analytics receives the hits but doesn't show estimates.
You can read more in Google's own guides to consent mode and behavioral modeling in Google Analytics.
Which one should you choose
Advanced gives Google more to work with, especially if you run Google Ads. Basic is the strictest choice, because nothing reaches Google before a visitor agrees.
Keep in mind that the stripped-down hits in Advanced still come from the visitor's browser, so Google still receives their IP address with each one. Some privacy regulators in Europe say that means Advanced still needs consent. If most of your visitors are in the EU and you want to play it safe, choose Basic.
New installs of Conversion Bridge start on Advanced. Sites that were already running Conversion Bridge before this setting existed stay on Basic, so updating never changes what your site sends to Google.
What stays the same in both modes
- Server-side conversions. If you send Google Ads conversions from your server, they always wait for marketing consent. Advanced only changes what the browser sends.
- Google Tag Manager. Conversion Bridge can't control which tags fire inside your container, so this setting doesn't affect Google Tag Manager. Set up consent for those tags in Tag Manager itself.
- Other platforms. Meta, TikTok and every other platform keep following your cookie banner as before. This setting is only for Google Analytics and Google Ads.
Cookie banners with their own setting
A few cookie banners take over this choice:
- Sunshine Consent has its own Google Consent Mode setting, and Conversion Bridge follows it. When Sunshine Consent is active, Conversion Bridge's cookie consent settings are replaced with a link to Sunshine Consent.
- Borlabs Cookie and Concord hold back Google's tags themselves until the visitor agrees, so they always work like Basic. The setting is hidden when one of them is selected.
Check that it's working
- Open your site in a private browser window, so you start as a new visitor.
- Add
?cb_console=1to the end of the address, then open your browser's developer console. - Before you click anything in the cookie banner, look for Conversion Bridge's messages about Google.
With Basic, you won't see Google Analytics or Google Ads events until you click accept. With Advanced, you'll see them right away, along with a note that consent is denied and the event will be estimated.