My Approach to Consent Management as a Digital Marketer

As the Director of Marketing Web Development at DataGrail, balancing consent management and user experience is top of mind. 

I’ve been working in the digital marketing space for well over a decade. During that time, I’ve implemented a variety of consent management tools across different websites wearing different hats—from being the sole owner of new installations to consulting and troubleshooting existing set ups. I’ve witnessed the standard for consent evolve from nothing at all, to simple cookie banners, to robust consent management platforms (CMP). 

What has always remained constant is trying to balance the needs of marketing, the needs of privacy, and the privacy rights of users. 

It’s my job to optimize the user experience. We do that, in part, by gathering data for marketing insights and web personalization. I also need to satisfy compliance requirements, but can’t make managing a CMP my full-time job. 

To facilitate this, I prioritize these key capabilities when approaching consent management:

• Customizability of the user interface
• Configurability to satisfy both internal and external privacy policies
• Fool-proof implementation and maintenance

In this blog, I’ll break down each of these and my approach to satisfying both marketing and privacy to create a great website experience without sacrificing privacy. 

Consent management and brand experience

Marketers spend countless hours optimizing the homepage of their website. Every word of copy matters. The typeface, the colors, the branding. We spend so long on this because it’s the very first impression of who we are to customers. 

Every piece of real estate on the website matters. So, when a privacy or legal team tells marketing they need to add a cookie banner, it’s understandable that it can sometimes be met with hesitancy. 

The cookie banner is a prominent element in the user experience but also under GDPR, I cannot trigger the majority of analytics and marketing tags without first explicitly collecting consent. 

Rather than initiating a tug of war between privacy and marketing, between tags and compliance, I’ve learned that consent is best approached as a team sport. 

With the right consent management tool, a privacy conversation can be started up-front with a visually and tonally cohesive consent banner that matches my organization’s brand. 

This is important for maintaining brand trust and maximizing my chances of collecting actionable data from engaged, opted-in visitors. The consent interface should match the colors, fonts, graphic elements, and language of my brand to present as seamless an experience as possible.

Configurability for internal and external privacy policies

Branding priorities met, I also need to ensure the consent management solution can be configured to not only keep the website generally compliant, but also be flexible enough to accommodate internal guidelines such as legal language, categorization of services, and policies specific to my organization. 

These may vary depending on the industry, services offered, risk tolerance, and other factors, but must still comply with regulations of all regions relevant to the business. Consent requirements differ by location and it is typically beneficial for the business to serve the minimum configuration needed to satisfy those requirements. 

Too strict a configuration may severely impact user experience, website functionality, and business-critical data collection, while too lax will leave the organization vulnerable to monetary penalties and loss of customer trust.

Fool-proof Implementation  

A consent management solution has to not only be easy to implement, but fool-proof.

Customization and configurability address requirements unique to the business, but neither are relevant if the consent solution is hard to implement properly. 

In my experience, CMPs are especially prone to incorrect implementation. This is supported by a recent audit revealing up to 75% of organizations fail to honor a site visitor’s preferences. 

Being a compliance-motivated initiative, businesses often view CMPs as a checklist item. Unfortunately, operating under this assumption can result in hard and, potentially, costly lessons, as many CMPs are hard to implement and not plug-and-play as they may advertise. 

I’ve repeatedly encountered many challenges with implementing consent management platforms such as: 

1. Manual configurations: A big challenge I’ve seen with CMPs is a high reliance on manual configurations involving multiple systems with different business owners— potentially across departments or even relying on external technical consultants. 
2. Lack of guard rails: As the implementation owner, I need to ensure that every tag is accounted for, categorized to the appropriate permission level, and triggered per visitors’ consent settings. Even with CMP products that can support all functional requirements from a technology perspective, a common lack of guard rails often results in flawed implementations where individual tags may fail unpredictably in race condition scenarios, or even systemically across all consent controls. Systemic failures may result in fines and customer complaints may be levied for each and every tag that fails to respect consent settings, exponentially increasing the risk to the business.
3. Failing silently: Perhaps the worst of all, I’ve found that many CMP products fail silently, necessitating proactive manual validation directly in the browser. In this regard, consent management is arguably the most sensitive function of data privacy. The incorrect functionality of a CMP can be identified by an even modestly tech-savvy end-user via browser inspection. 

Beyond implementation, even with a well-planned and successful launch, scalability and long-term maintenance remain an ongoing challenge as tag usage evolves. Every time someone in the organization wants to modify a tag, update a policy, or change the core functionality of the website, I need to ensure consent controls are still being honored, which involves a lot of manual effort including tracking down stakeholders involved in the initial set up. 

The New Standard: DataGrail Consent

I couldn’t end this blog without providing digital marketers a solution to the pain they might be feeling. And yes, conveniently, the best CMP I have ever used is from the place I work. 

But DataGrail’s mission was to do Consent differently and build a solution from the ground up. I was fortunate enough to share my insights and feature requests directly with the team while they developed the product. As a result, DataGrail Consent was practically made to order for my needs as a digital marketer. 

With DataGrail Consent, I can: 

• Modify the overall user layer appearance through preset color themes, or at a granular level via custom CSS. 
• Customize categories and banner text, localized by language.
• Configure banner display settings for each policy already managed and approved by my organization directly in the DataGrail application. 
• Easily implement and utilize the platform’s capabilities by reading DataGrail Consent’s well documented docs, so I don’t have to search discussion boards or reach out to a support rep. 

DataGrail also integrates directly with Google Tag Manager, importing all tags and pre-categorizing them when appropriate. 

Most importantly, once I am ready to publish, DataGrail Consent automatically writes permissions per tag to GTM, removing the need for manual configuration and minimizing the potential for human error. It works across multiple GTM containers and subdomains so I can avoid redundant management tasks and provide our customers with a cohesive web experience.

Digital marketers, the consent solution you’ll actually want to use is here. Take an interactive tour here and if you’re interested in learning more, you can request a demo with our team here.