You advertise exports, a shop that delivers to Poland or a salon in Warsaw. Enquiries come in, but Google Ads sees only some of them, and remarketing (repeat ads for people who have already visited your site) seems to have “lost weight”. A common cause is that the website asks visitors from Europe for cookie consent incorrectly. Cookies are small files that let a site recognise a person and count where they came from.
Below we explain what exactly Google requires, what you lose without it, how to check it yourself and where practitioners’ opinions differ from Google’s help pages. We checked every help-page point on 7 October 2026. This is not legal advice: how the law applies to your particular website is best clarified with a lawyer.
What Google requires
According to Google Ads Help, to keep using measurement and ad personalisation you need to collect consent from users in the European Economic Area (EEA) and pass “consent signals” to Google. There are two of them: ad_user_data (whether a person’s data may be used for advertising) and ad_personalization (whether personalised ads may be shown to them). The requirements for these apply from March 2024.
Separately, there is Google’s EU user consent policy. It covers not only the EEA but also the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Under it, an advertiser must obtain legally valid consent for cookies and for the collection and use of personal data for ad personalisation, keep records of consent and let people withdraw it. If this is missing, Google reserves the right to limit or suspend your use of its products.
How a site passes a person’s choice to Google is called consent mode. One important nuance from Google’s help: consent mode does not provide a consent banner. It only interacts with the banner your site already has.
What you lose without it
Google Analytics Help says it plainly: if you do not collect and share consent signals, then from March 2024 only users outside the EEA will be included in audiences used by linked advertising products (for example, Google Ads). For visitors from the EU, that means three losses:
- tracking of enquiries and purchases in Google Ads;
- repeat ads to people who have already visited your site;
- the data your ads learn from to find buyers.
How much data exactly you will lose, Google does not say: it depends on your site and on how many Europeans visit it. Round figures such as “up to 30%” circulate online, but the author of that estimate shows no methodology, so we do not quote it.
“There is a banner” does not mean “it works”
This is the main trap. A strip saying “We use cookies” with an “OK” button usually passes nothing to Google, so as far as Google is concerned it does not exist. A banner has to record each visitor’s choice, “accept” or “decline”, and pass it to Google Ads and Analytics. Practitioners are unanimous that this should be checked separately: the mere fact that a banner is on the site proves nothing.
From our practice: when reviewing a site, we first look at the “banner → Google” link, and only then at the rest of the settings.
Who this applies to
Websites visited by people from the EEA, the UK or Switzerland: exports, a shop delivering to Poland, services in Warsaw or Berlin. If you work only in Ukraine, Google does not require this from you.
There is a nuance, though: the policy speaks about users in those regions, not about where your ads are targeted. Ukrainians who now live in Poland open Ukrainian websites too. How Google treats a handful of such visitors, the help pages do not specify. So do not guess, look at the numbers: at the top of the consent settings page in Google Analytics you may see the share of your traffic and conversions from the EEA (the path is below). If the percentage is noticeable, the question is already yours.
What to do: three steps
- Install a banner through a consent management platform certified by Google. It is a service that shows the banner and passes the person’s choice to Google by itself. Google Tag Manager Help advises getting the banner from a Google-certified partner. For clients we set up CookieYes: its pricing page lists it as a “Google Certified CMP”, and Google Consent Mode v2 is supported on all plans. The free plan at the time of checking: 5,000 page views per month and scanning of up to 100 pages. Showing the banner only to visitors from the EU (geo-targeting) starts, according to the pricing page, with the Pro plan at $25 a month.
- Connect it to Google Tag Manager. It is a “remote control” for the counters on your site (we covered it in the checklist of what to connect to your website). According to Tag Manager Help, a special trigger type, Consent Initialization, fires before all other tags, so consent settings apply before the counters start.
- Check that the visitor’s answer reaches Google Ads and Analytics. How exactly, we explain below.
We have a page about how we set up tracking: web analytics. If you want to do it yourself, these three steps are enough: nothing needs programming, but you do need access to Tag Manager.
How to check in Google Analytics
Open analytics.google.com. According to Google Analytics Help: in Admin, under Data collection and modification, click Consent settings. There are two sections: one about advertising-related consent signals and one about behaviour analytics consent signals. In each, Analytics may alert you to problems with receiving signals. Note two clarifications from the help page:
- after the banner starts passing signals, it may take 48–72 hours for the notifications to update, so do not draw conclusions after the first hour;
- which marks (colours, icons) the interface shows, the help page does not describe. That is why we do not promise a “green tick”: look at whether the sections show warnings.
If there is a warning, the banner most likely passes nothing to Google. Also open your site in an incognito window: a banner with “Accept” and “Reject” buttons should appear.
Where practitioners disagree
Which mode to use: basic or advanced. According to Google Analytics Help, in basic mode tags do not load until the person consents, and Google states directly that then “you will not get the full benefits” of consent mode: there will be no modelled data about people who declined. In advanced mode tags load before the person chooses and, if they decline, send only “cookieless pings”, from which Google models the missing data. Among practitioners, some recommend advanced mode precisely because of modelling, while others remind us that a tag that starts before consent may be a legal risk for sites with EU visitors. Google’s help describes only the technical difference and does not settle the legal part: that is a question for a lawyer.
From what volume modelling works. Google Ads Help says that conversion modelling requires “a daily ad click threshold of 700 ad clicks over a 7 day period, per country and domain grouping”, plus correctly implemented consent mode or IAB TCF. With a small ad budget this threshold is most likely out of reach, but that is our conclusion, not Google’s words. Google Analytics Help on behavioural modelling has no such numbers. Practitioners give their own figures, for example at least 1,000 events a day with consent and as many without it per region. Officially Google gives no such figure for Analytics, so this is somebody’s opinion, not a rule.
How much data will “drop” after the banner. Practitioners say that after a banner launches, traffic in Google Analytics may fall for a week or two because some people decline. Google gives no such figure. So watch the trend and do not switch the banner off in a panic: without it you break the requirements, while the numbers simply become more honest.
Summary
- If you advertise to the EU, the UK or Switzerland (or have a noticeable share of visitors from there), the site must ask for consent and pass the answer to Google.
- A banner on its own does not count: check that the answer reaches Google Ads and Analytics.
- The check: Analytics → Admin → Data collection and modification → Consent settings, plus an incognito window and the “Accept” and “Reject” buttons.
- If you work only in Ukraine and there are almost no Europeans on your site, Google does not require this.
The general principles of checking tracking are described in the article about three checks. You can read how we set up advertising in the search advertising and Performance Max sections.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request — we will look at your account and tell you whether your visitors’ choice reaches Google and what is worth fixing.