By Jon Elson
29 Apr 2025 · 7 Min Read
In a bid to ensure compliance at all costs, some brands are opting to restrict all data collection until a user has ‘accepted all’ cookies or if they choose to reject cookies, never collect any data at all, resulting in a significant limitation to brands' analytics and marketing.
But who can blame them with the prospect of a £17.5m or 4% of global revenue fine for non-compliance. Today, we're going to discuss this in more detail. We'll examine why providing consent options matters, the impact it has on your analytics and marketing, and why simply accepting or rejecting options does not necessarily equate to cookie compliance. We'll also cover how to go beyond relying on cookies for marketing and analytics.
What’s the impact of ‘accept’ and ‘reject’?
We mentioned above the ‘significant limitation’ to brands' analytics and marketing for ‘accept and reject cookie banners’, but what does this really mean?
Well, a typical example here is that if a user comes to a brand’s website and chooses to reject all cookies, that brand is going to have no understanding of what that user did on their website, nor what advertising or marketing efforts they engaged with that brought them there. Scale this up to say 40% of your website traffic (depending on the rate of cookie acceptance), and making any informed decision about marketing performance or simply improving a brand's website usability becomes highly fractured.
Is it still compliant?
Even though a brand may be missing 40% of website analytics and marketing data, at least they are still compliant, right? Not necessarily.
In fact, the ICO highlighted in the article mentioned previously that their regulatory expectation is that organisations must “comply with the law by giving people meaningful choice on how their personal information is used online”. This makes a simple accept or reject cookie banner ambiguous in its ability to provide users with a ‘meaningful choice’ about what they are accepting or rejecting.
An alternative to accept and reject
So, if you do go beyond 'accept all' and 'reject all,' what’s the alternative?
Typically, your cookies are already being categorised into separate buckets. The alternative is that, rather than granting or denying every bucket on accept or reject, you’ll provide the user with the option to accept or reject each category. In fact, some consent management platforms even provide details of which cookies fall into each category and how they are used. The specific categories can vary slightly depending on the website and its purpose. Here are some of the most common and important cookie consent categories you'll encounter:
Strictly Necessary Cookies:
- These are essential for the website to function properly. They enable core functionalities like page navigation, security, and access to secure areas.
- These cookies generally do not require user consent as they are vital for the website's basic operation.
Performance/Analytics Cookies:
- These cookies collect information about how visitors use the website, such as which pages they visit most often and if they receive any error messages.
- This data helps website owners understand user behavior, identify areas for improvement, and optimize the website's performance.
- Google Analytics, as mentioned in the previous response, often falls under this category.
Functionality Cookies:
- These cookies allow the website to remember choices you make (such as your language preference) and provide enhanced, more personalized features.
- They may also be used to provide services like watching a video or commenting on a blog.
Marketing/Advertising Cookies:
- These cookies are used to track visitors across websites and gather information about their interests.
- This data is then used to deliver targeted advertisements that are more relevant to the individual user.
- These cookies are often placed by third-party advertising networks.
The impact of consent categories
Off the bat, this change can improve your analytics and marketing tracking by enabling those relevant platforms to fire tags dependent on the specific consent category as opposed to all categories.
For example, a user may be comfortable with analytics cookies but not marketing cookies. As such platforms such as Google Analytics can still operate, providing valuable insights into user behaviour that can equally be used to support your marketing performance.
Secondly, providing users the information of what cookie categories are used on a brand's website and allowing them to choose which category to grant or reject conforms to the ICO’s expectation of “clear choices and confidence in how their information is used”.
Finally, studies have shown that providing the option and informing the user can improve brand trust with users, along with increasing the overall acceptance rate of cookies.
A 2022 report by the Exchange Lab and Populus found that “87% of US consumers said they would be more likely to opt-in to cookies if companies were more responsible and offered easy opt-out options”.
This shows that providing a greater level of granularity and allowing users to make an informed decision can result in an improved acceptance rate, resulting in enhanced data-driven decision making for brands' analytics and marketing.
Going beyond cookie reliance
Up til now, we have been discussing the impact of cookie compliance on performance marketing and analytics, but what if marketing and analytics weren’t solely reliant on cookies? What if brands could still make informed decisions on marketing activities or user behaviour on their website without this data being fundamentally tied to cookies? As I’m sure you have probably guessed by now, such means already exist.
One such example is Google Consent Mode. This operates by allowing Google tags such as GA4 or Google Ads to fire regardless of a user's consent. Then, Google adapts what data is sent to its platforms based on the consent provided by that user. One such example of this is cookieless pings, where if a user decides to reject all analytics and marketing cookies, Google sends anonymised and non-identifiable hits that may include information such as user agents and screen resolution, but cannot be associated back to a user.
This information is then used for conversion and behavioural modelling, combining both cookie-based and non-cookie data sources, aiming to make up for the 40% of analytics and marketing data (which we used as an example previously).
Another example is the resurgence of marketing mix modelling (MMM). This sits completely separate from the digital tracking ecosystem by taking a bird's eye view of a brand's daily marketing spend by channel (or vertical) against its sales and revenue.
Then uses various modelling techniques to understand a channel's incremental value, diminishing returns and predicting future optimal performance. The long-awaited release of Meridian, Google’s open source MMM framework, is testament to the development in this field. In fact, if a brand's marketing strategy spans across multiple channels, both online and offline, it is often paramount to adopt some form of MMM to understand the incremental value of their marketing investment.
Final thoughts
In this article, we discuss using ‘accept’ and ‘reject’ all cookie banners on a brand’s websites, the impact on performance marketing and analytics, and adherence to cookie compliance. We’ve examined the alternative, providing users the option to consent to different cookie categories and the impact this can have on a brand's trust and reporting capabilities.
Finally, we’ve considered the growing focus on analytics and reporting technologies that do not rely on cookies as a fundamental basis for their insights. Overall, despite it being 7 years since the start of GDPR, brands are still playing catch-up on the requirements of cookie compliance and how best to acquire consent, along with the application of that data once consent has been provided. With ICO now actively “bringing the UK’s top 1,000 websites into compliance with data protection law”, the clock is ticking for brands to comply.
If you have any questions about Cookie Consent Management for your website, Google Consent Mode or how Marketing Mix Modelling can help your brand, please reach out to our expert team here at Bind Media.