You ship goods to Poland, serve customers in Germany, or simply see that people from Europe visit your site. If you also advertise on Google, there is one thing owners often miss: the pop-up where a visitor decides whether the site may remember what they do. Without it, ads slowly loses part of its audience.
The sections below cover Google’s demand, the cost of skipping the pop-up, a do-it-yourself setup, and CookieYes, the tool we install for clients. Treat it as a business overview rather than legal advice; a lawyer can tell you how the law fits your case. Each Google statement was verified in its help pages on November 10, 2026.
What Google requires
A cookie is a tiny file saved in the browser: thanks to it, a website knows a returning person and where they arrived from. In the European Economic Area (EU countries plus a few neighbours) the person has to be asked whether they allow this. Google Ads help puts it this way: to keep using measurement, ad personalisation and remarketing, you need to obtain consent to the use of personal data from end users in the EEA. Once you have it, you must tell Google that the person has answered.
Google Analytics help adds a date: from the beginning of March 2024, only end users outside the EEA are included in audiences for linked advertising products if these signals are not passed. Personalised ads and remarketing need consent signals from visitors.
What happens without a consent window
According to the same help pages there are two consequences, and both are concrete.
Remarketing. These are repeat ads for people who already visited your site: the “catch-up” advertising that reminds them about a cart or a service. European visitors do not get into such lists. The advertising simply does not see that they were on your site.
Lead tracking. When a person has refused the use of data for advertising, the export of conversion data by click ID to Google Ads is limited. Put simply, Google Ads stops crediting part of the leads from Europeans to your advertising. The report looks worse, and the algorithm gets fewer hints about which customers to look for.
How many percent that is for you, the help does not say, and we will not invent numbers: it all depends on the share of Europeans in your traffic. You can estimate it yourself: open the Analytics report on visitor countries and count how many are in the EU. If the share is noticeable, you need the pop-up.
Consent Mode, its basic and advanced variants, the thresholds for modelling and checking in Analytics were already covered separately in our article on the cookie banner and consent mode. We do not repeat that here and move on to practice.
How to set up the window yourself
There are two ways. Google Ads help allows you either to build your own banner or to use a consent management platform (CMP). The second is easier for an owner: the tool shows it, remembers the answer and passes it to Google by itself. The order is:
- Choose a service and create an account.
- Set the look of the window and the texts.
- Copy the code to your site or connect the service through Google Tag Manager.
- Open your pages in a private browser tab: the pop-up should appear and the visitor’s choice should be saved.
What “connecting through Tag Manager” means and why it is needed is described in our checklist of what should be connected to your site. If your site is built with a website builder and has no Tag Manager, first find out whether the builder lets you insert custom code: you can see it in the site settings.
CookieYes review
On its home page the service describes itself as a cookie consent solution that helps a website meet GDPR and CCPA requirements, and calls itself a Google-certified CMP, that is, a platform certified by Google. The one we install for clients is CookieYes. Here is what you can check on its site.
What it does:
- a banner built from a template you can adapt to your site, with code you copy to your pages;
- automatic cookie blocking and scheduled monthly scanning of the site;
- a consent log that stores people’s answers;
- integration with Google Tag Manager, Consent Mode v2 and IAB TCF v2.4 (an advertising-industry standard for passing consent).
What it costs. According to the pricing page, the free plan gives 5,000 pageviews a month and scanning of up to 100 pages at a time. Consent Mode v2 and the Google Certified CMP label are on all four plans, the free one included. Paid plans, in dollars a month: Basic is 10, Pro is 25, Ultimate is 55. There is also a 14-day free trial of a paid plan.
What is paid, which matters for a site aimed at Poland:
- showing the window only to visitors from chosen regions (geo-targeting) starts with the Pro plan;
- a multilingual banner, including automatic translation, starts with Basic. The pricing table does not list it for the free plan, so a Polish or German visitor would see the window in another language;
- removing the CookieYes branding from the banner is possible only on Ultimate.
Is the free plan enough
Compare the limit with your own number. In Google Analytics check how many pageviews you have in a month. If they stay within 5,000 and the site is small, the free plan is enough to start. If you have more visitors or need the window in several languages, look at Basic and Pro. What exactly happens when the limit is exceeded, the pricing page does not explain, so read the service terms before launch.
Prefer not to do it yourself: setting up the window and passing the signals to Google is part of our web analytics.
Summary
- Have visitors from the EU and advertise on Google? You need a consent window: since March 2024, without signals from people they do not get into remarketing audiences.
- Without consent, fewer conversions from Europeans reach Google Ads, so the report shows a worse result.
- You can set the window up yourself through a CMP such as CookieYes: free up to 5,000 pageviews a month, with Google Certified CMP and Consent Mode v2.
- Several languages and showing the window only to Europeans need a paid plan.
General principles of checking tracking are in the article on three checks. See how we set up advertising in the sections on search advertising and Performance Max.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request: we will look at your account and tell you whether the choice of your visitors from Europe reaches Google.