Advanced analytics and consent management
Advanced analytics make it possible to understand your website visitors in great detail – when they visit, what they do, and sometimes even why they engage. This insight is powerful but comes with responsibility: the same data can be misused, exposed, or harvested by third parties if not properly managed. Protecting user privacy is therefore not optional; it must be built into your website’s design and operation from the outset.
A Consent Management Platform (CMP) provides the framework for doing this properly. It ensures that tracking technologies and personal data collection comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), where informed consent is a legal requirement.
Many websites underestimate the complexity of cookies and trackers – most are hidden within scripts and change dynamically. A CMP automatically scans your site to detect every tracker, classify them, and manage how and when they load. This enables you to give users genuine, informed choice while maintaining accurate data collection once consent has been given.
How we implement CMPs
At Castlegate IT, we use Cookiebot, a leading CMP trusted by public sector bodies, charities, and businesses across Europe. We begin with a full scan of your website to identify all cookies, tags, and tracking scripts. Based on this audit, Cookiebot generates a clear consent banner and cookie declaration, allowing visitors to grant or refuse consent by category. This ensures your site operates transparently and remains GDPR-compliant.
Benefits beyond compliance
Consent Mode is Google’s framework for respecting user privacy while preserving useful analytics and advertising data. When Consent Mode is enabled and integrated with a CMP, visitors are offered a clear choice to grant or withhold consent.
If consent is granted, Google Ads and Analytics can use cookies and identifiers to collect detailed data such as demographics, interests, location, conversion paths, and cross-device behaviour. This enables rich audience reporting and accurate measurement of advertising performance.
When no consent is given – or if the site lacks a CMP – tracking cookies cannot be set. In that case, only limited, anonymised, or modelled data is available. You can still view overall conversion totals, but you lose granular insights into user behaviour and audience segments, making marketing optimisation less precise.
Beyond regulatory compliance, implementing a CMP and Consent Mode integration improves the integrity and credibility of your analytics, protects your organisation from privacy breaches, and demonstrates ethical data stewardship.
Many funding bodies and institutional partners now require demonstrable privacy controls. By being transparent about how you collect and process data, you strengthen user trust, uphold your legal obligations, and gain a competitive advantage in an increasingly privacy-conscious digital landscape.
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