Cookies For All! Do Websites Need Cookie Consent?

Google Analytics, WordPress, GDPR … cookies come in all shapes and sizes, and have outsize importance for digital marketing functions. But they also require consent – and they’re changing, too.

What is cookie consent? 

It’s the informed acceptance by your users of your website’s specific use of cookies to track their activity with you. GDPR requires cookie consent; Google Analytics require it, too, and are changing which cookies they’ll permit you to use. This places new demands on your marketers. 

The key is to find a quick, easy solution to obtain cookie consent straight away and without disrupting the user experience. Whether your website is bespoke or based on WordPress, cookie consent can be a surprisingly straightforward thing to obtain. The important thing is to ensure the process is embedded into your website, and doesn’t risk increasing your bounce rate.

But again: what exactly is cookie consent – and, for that matter, what are cookies?!

How Do Cookies Work?

There are the ones you crack open to reveal a little message inside, and the ones that have chocolate chips … and there are the ones that track the activity of visitors to your website. This last kind are tiny blocks of data which can store information about how each of your users is interacting with your site.

Why is this useful information? For you, it unlocks a range of data – often collected via Google Analytics’ cookie consent process – that enables you to improve your website: traffic metrics, bounce rates, user demographics are all recordable via cookies.

But the user gets something, too: cookies can transfer data from one session on a website to a next, enabling them to access their favourite features more quickly and more easily. Cookies are actually produced by a server for each individual user, making them very personal to each visitor. And this empowers personalised browsing in a way that can be very rewarding.

From keeping products in your shopping basket to ensuring you don’t have to enter your delivery or contact information on every visit, cookies help you as a user of a site develop a relationship of convenience with that site. In this way, both company and customer gain something valuable from the humble cookie.

How Do Cookies Work – And How Are They Changing?

You don’t need us to tell you that your website is a valuable business asset. That makes information about that website equally valuable – the data you collect about your users and their behaviour is the data you’ll use to improve your website’s ROI.

Until recently, a business or its marketing agency could store and retrieve this information relatively easily – via Google Analytics, now called GA4.  Tracking total visitor numbers has always been one of the key metrics businesses look for, of course – after all, you can’t make a sale online, or increase your brand awareness, if no-one is clicking through to your site in the first place.    

But plenty of other metrics are available, too. And all of this data is collected via cookies. … recently, being able to track those visitors has changed – all down to cookies. Traditionally, so called ‘third-party’ cookies have been used – these are little bits of data that can track user behaviour across multiple websites, monitoring promotional videos or pop-up ads for example.

But Google are phasing out this type of cookie for 2024, in favour of ‘first-party’ cookies – that is, ones that are generated only for a single domain, and can monitor users only on that single website.

Do You Need Cookie Consent On Your Website?

The simple answer is: yes. UK GDPR requires informed consent from a user if you are to store any data about them, and this includes both third- and first-party cookies. The good news is that there are many ways to do this easily, including plug-ins for WordPress cookie consent that make gathering data super easy.

The key is that this consent must be specific. What are the cookies on your specific website doing? Are they recording advertising information, or user preferences? Are they recording statistics about how a user interacts with particular features of your site? Are they saved permanently, or restricted to a single session? Whatever your specific approach to cookies, a site must gain user consent for those exact usages.

Again, handy widgets and plug-ins exist that can scan your cookies and produce tailored consent forms for users to accept – or, of course, to reject. Empowering users to refuse cookies has certainly posed further challenges to marketers – many users do indeed decline to allow websites to store their data. Businesses have had to learn to roll with this development in digital privacy.

What Does All This Mean For Your Business?

First and foremost, your business must be in compliance with the law – and gather permission for the cookies you use. Secondly, your website needs to be fit for the new world of GA4 – and do away with third-party cookies. There will likely come a day when the move towards giving users greater control over their digital privacy comes for first-part cookies, too; but for now you should focus on using those.

Likewise, you’ll need to read your website metrics differently: an apparent drop in visitors is likely nothing of the sort, since a change in cookie type and the privacy preferences of your users will definitely alter the data you’re recording. You may have more visitors – but if they decline your cookies, or just close the consent box without explicitly accepting them, you simply won’t see them!

So change the way you think about web metrics, and adopt new strategies, too: e-newsletters and online surveys, for instance, will become more important as direct means of understanding users as cookies become more fraught. Watch for an increase in leads and conversions, too: if these happen, you know you’re doing OK, even if you’re a little blind as to how.

Likewise, a renewed focus on getting as high in search results for your site’s keyphrases as possible is crucial: get a high position on Google, and you will still be doing well – even if you can’t prove it as clearly as before! A holistic view of your website is now a must: how many phone calls is your customer service team getting, how many enquiries is your sales team receiving? These metrics are now part of your digital marketing dataset. 

In other words, digital marketing might be a bit harder than before – but that makes it more valuable, not less. We’re going to need to infer more and rely on cookies less. Our digital marketing experts are always happy to talk more about this new world – just drop us a line or give us a call, no obligation!

The changes in cookie law and practice are significant, and cookie consent is now a must. Google Analytics is changing, and GDPR places serious requirements on business. So yes, you need cookie consent and yes, you need new digital marketing strategies. But the good news? There are plenty of exciting ways forward.

In fact, if we were a fortune cookie, our team would tell you that your business can still be bright.