Cookie Consent - What You Need to Know and Do
We might not give much thought to annoying tracking cookie banners online, but for the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the UK, they are a serious matter - and they should be for your website, too.
The subject of cookie banners and the tracking behind them are regularly in the news.
The Guardian uncovered several charities that didn’t correctly set up their cookie banners, and SkyBet was reprimanded by the ICO for tracking users without first asking for consent.
The ICO's focus in 2025 is on forcing the top 1,000 UK sites to comply with cookie banner regulations. Non-compliance penalties can be severe - fines of up to £500,000 or 4% of global annual turnover. However, even reputational damage from reprimand should be avoided.
Why should your website stay on the right side of the regulations?
Cookies, Consent and the Regulations
Cookies of the tracking variety are small files downloaded to a person’s device in the background as they browse a website.
This is very useful for understanding how to improve the user experience on a website and optimise advertising campaigns.
Cookies also provide functionality to the website user, like the timesaving autofill function on forms.
However, cookies aren’t a free-for-all for marketers.
In the UK and EU, two regulations - the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations, and better-known General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – requires “consent” from the user before cookies can be deployed.
The regulations specify that consent to tracking must be explicit, informed, freely given, specific, and unambiguous and should be ‘opt-in’. Users must also be provided with clear information about the cookies used.
Consent is key to compliance, but how do websites ask users for this?
How to Collect Consent
Some website owners might feel that tracking isn’t right for them and their customers. It’s true that many businesses can grow without digital channels.
However, for those who need to reach customers digitally, doing so without tracking is likely to be costly and frustrating because it makes it impossible to measure and optimise.
So, what can be done?
Cookie banners are a good solution to this problem because they allow the user to consent to tracking in an accessible, unambiguous way.
When users decline to be tracked, their data is lost. A 60-80% consent rate is to be expected, but even lower is not unusual.
While this is frustrating for marketers, staying compliant and respecting user consent is more important.
The remaining data is often enough to make strategic and tactical marketing decisions. Simply waiting longer for enough data to be collected solves this problem.
Most would find designing a cookie banner system from scratch an uphill struggle, but there is an off-the-shelf solution.
Consent Management Platforms
A Consent Management Platform (CMP) enables websites to collect, manage and store user consent.
Many CMP providers are available, with some packaged into a comprehensive all-in-one solution for GDPR and data protection needs, including handling data subject access requests.
One of the leading CMPs is Cookiebot™ by Usercentrics. Cookiebot CMP offers several benefits:
• Effortless cookie compliance with regional data privacy laws such as GDPR, CCPA (the regulations in California) and more.
• Customisable consent banner designed according to your needs, brand look & feel
• Highly automated process that is quick and easy to use and manage – with little or no maintenance from you as a website owner.
How would you go about implementing Cookiebot CMP?
Setting Up a Consent Management Platform
The easiest way to implement Cookiebot CMP is through Google Tag Manager (GTM), which is how tracking is already deployed on many sites.
To start, the Cookiebot CMP account must be created and given 24 hours to scan.
Cookiebot CMP is set to deploy the strictest, GDPR-compliant cookie banner by default, so we don’t recommend changing this.
If you need the cookie banner to align with your brand, the design can be amended to include brand logos and colours.
Once you've done this, you can set things up in Google Tag Manager. Cookiebot CMP has written a convenient guide on how to do this.
Cookiebot with Google Tag Manager - Done For You
We’ve established why it’s critical from a legal and reputational perspective to gather consent for tracking in a compliant way.
We’ve explained why cookie banners exist to capture this consent and that consent management platforms like Cookiebot CMP are the best way to do it.
We’ve also covered how to set up Cookiebot CMP and get a cookie banner to live on your website.
If you would rather focus on something else, that's no problem! Just send us a message, and we can get a cookie banner live on your site in no time.
The information provided in this article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. The content primarily relates to UK and EU regulations, and privacy laws in other regions may differ significantly. For specific legal advice, please consult your legal representative.
