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Guide · Google Ads & Analytics

Google Consent Mode v2 for WordPress, set up for free

Templates Rocket · Updated October 2026 · 6 min read

Short answer: Consent Mode v2 is how your site tells Google Analytics and Google Ads whether each visitor accepted or declined cookies. Since March 2024, Google requires those signals for visitors in the European Economic Area if you want to keep measurement, ad personalization and remarketing. On WordPress you turn it on with a consent banner that has it built in, and a free one will do.

The four signals

  • ad_storage: whether advertising cookies or identifiers can be stored.
  • analytics_storage: whether analytics cookies can be stored, such as visit duration.
  • ad_user_data: whether user data can be sent to Google for advertising.
  • ad_personalization: whether ads can be personalized. When denied, remarketing gets no data.

Version 2 added the last two. A banner that only sends the first two is out of date.

Who actually needs it

Google's requirement covers traffic from the EEA. Per Google Analytics, without the signals only users outside the EEA are included in the audiences your linked ad products use, and personalized advertising and remarketing need affirmative consent. If you run Google Ads, GA4 audiences or offline conversion imports and get European visitors, you need it. If your audience is US-only, Google does not require it, but it is still the cleanest way to make Google's tags honor the choice your banner offers.

Basic vs advanced

  • Basic: Google tags do not load until the visitor accepts. If they decline, Google receives nothing, not even the consent state, and can only apply a general model to estimate conversions.
  • Advanced: tags load with everything denied and send cookieless pings in the meantime. That lets Google build an advertiser-specific model, which recovers more of the conversions from people who declined.

Set it up on WordPress, no code

  1. Install Cookie Rocket from Plugins → Add New Plugin and activate it.
  2. Open Cookie Rocket → Blocking and check that Google Consent Mode v2 is on. It is on by default.
  3. That's it. The plugin sets all signals to denied in the page head, before any Google tag loads, and updates them the moment the visitor decides. Returning visitors get their earlier choice applied from the first hit.

It works with Tag Manager, Site Kit or a gtag snippet, as long as those tags load through WordPress (the theme head or a plugin) rather than before it. The free version runs in basic mode together with script blocking; Cookie Rocket Pro adds advanced mode.

Check that it works

  1. Open Google Tag Assistant and connect your site.
  2. Before you click anything, the consent default should show all four signals as denied.
  3. Accept on the banner. The matching signals should switch to granted.

If you show AdSense ads in Europe

Serving personalized AdSense ads to users in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland also requires a Google-certified consent platform integrated with the IAB TCF. Cookie Rocket is not certified. For that case, pick a certified platform such as CookieYes, Cookiebot or Complianz. We compare them in CookieYes vs Cookiebot and Complianz vs CookieYes.

Sources

Get it free See Cookie Rocket Pro