Consent Mode V2: What It Actually Changes and What You Still Need to Do
Google's Consent Mode V2 is now required for EU advertising. Here's what changed, what it actually models, and what your CMP vendor isn't telling you.
Since March 2024, Google requires Consent Mode V2 for any advertiser running campaigns in the EU or EEA. If you're using a Consent Management Platform (CMP) and haven't upgraded, your conversion modelling is either broken or running on V1 signals — which Google is gradually deprecating.
What's New in V2
Consent Mode V2 adds two new parameters to the existing four: ad_user_data and ad_personalization. These control whether user data can be sent to Google for advertising purposes and whether that data can be used for ad personalization. Both must be set to 'denied' until explicit consent is granted.
Warning
Setting ad_user_data and ad_personalization to 'granted' by default — before consent — is a GDPR violation, even if your CMP is technically 'installed'. Many implementations do exactly this.
// Set defaults BEFORE gtag.js loads
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag() { dataLayer.push(arguments); }
// All denied by default
gtag('consent', 'default', {
ad_storage: 'denied',
ad_user_data: 'denied',
ad_personalization: 'denied',
analytics_storage: 'denied',
wait_for_update: 500,
region: ['AT','BE','BG','HR','CY','CZ','DK','EE','FI','FR','DE','GR',
'HU','IE','IT','LV','LT','LU','MT','NL','PL','PT','RO','SK',
'SI','ES','SE'],
});