10 April 2024

Why Australian businesses should care about tracking consent in 2026

Updated: 4 February 2026

This article is not written or presented as legal advice. Readers should not act on, or rely upon, the information or opinions expressed without seeking appropriate professional advice.

In summary

• Tracking consent is no longer a compliance edge case, it now directly affects measurement, remarketing and performance.
• Consent Mode v2 is effectively mandatory across Google’s ad and analytics stack, with enforcement already live.
• Australian Privacy Act reforms mean consent expectations are shifting closer to GDPR-style standards.
• Businesses without proper consent infrastructure risk losing data visibility, not just breaching policy.

What is Consent Mode, and why it matters now

Consent Mode allows businesses to adjust how tracking tags and scripts behave based on a user’s consent choices. In practice, this means analytics, advertising and remarketing tags only fire, or send limited signals, when the appropriate permissions are granted.

Originally introduced in response to European privacy regulation, Consent Mode has now become a global measurement dependency, not a regional compliance workaround.

As of 2026, Consent Mode is best understood as core marketing infrastructure, not a legal overlay.

What’s changed since most teams last looked at this

A lot. And quietly. Over the past 18 months, Google has fundamentally tightened how consent signals are enforced across its ecosystem:

• Consent Mode v2 is now the default expectation, introducing explicit signals for:
  Ad user data
  Ad personalisation
• Advertising features access is restricted when consent signals are missing or misconfigured, including:
  • Conversion modelling
  • Audience building
  • Remarketing eligibility
• Chrome’s ongoing decoupling from third-party cookies means consent signals now play a much bigger role in attribution and optimisation.
• Other platforms, including Meta and TikTok, have introduced their own consent APIs, increasing fragmentation for businesses without a unified approach.

Why Australian businesses should care (even if you don’t operate in Europe)

For years, many Australian organisations treated consent as a “European issue”. That position is no longer viable, as it is part of Google and Meta’s terms of business within their platform policies.

Three forces are converging:

• Platform enforcement is global - If your site receives visitors from Europe, or uses global ad platforms, consent requirements already apply.
• Australia’s Privacy Act reforms are coming - The federal government has signalled stronger individual rights, higher penalties, and clearer expectations around consent, purpose limitation and data minimisation.

• Measurement now depends on consent signals - Without consent signals:

  • GA4 modelling is limited
  • Audience strategies break down
  • Reporting gaps widen, not shrink

In 2026, poor consent implementation doesn’t just create compliance risk, it undermines marketing effectiveness.

How Consent Mode is typically implemented today

Stage 1: Deploy a Consent Management Platform (CMP)

Most organisations now rely on a CMP rather than custom builds. Mature platforms offer:

• Native integrations with Consent Mode v2
• GA4 and Tag Manager compatibility
• Region-specific consent logic

Free tools exist, but in practice often lack the flexibility and reliability required for complex stacks.

Stage 2: Configure tags to respect consent states

Within Google Tag Manager, tags can be configured to:

• Fire only when required consent is granted
• Send limited, non-identifying signals when consent is denied
• Automatically inherit consent states from the Consent Management Platform [CMP]

This is now largely configuration work, but still requires careful QA.

Stage 3: Validate, test and monitor

Consent behaviour should be actively tested:

• Across regions
• Across consent choices
• Across devices and browsers

Misconfigured consent can quietly block data flows without obvious errors, making diagnostics and monitoring essential.

What Consent Mode looks like in practice

Most users encounter Consent Mode through a cookie banner or consent overlay.

Depending on the CMP, users may be offered:

• Broad category-based choices (essential, analytics, advertising)
• Or more granular cookie-level controls

There’s no one “right” approach. The appropriate level of granularity depends on:

• Applicable legislation
• Risk appetite
• Business model
• Legal guidance
• Audience demographics

The upside: Consent isn’t just a constraint

While Consent Mode introduces complexity, it also enables important capabilities:

• Modelled measurement - GA4 relies on consent signals to model conversions and behaviour where direct tracking isn’t possible.
• Privacy-safe attribution - Consent Mode underpins Google’s Privacy Sandbox APIs and future attribution approaches.
• Trust and transparency - Clear consent practices reduce reputational risk and signal maturity to customers, partners and regulators.

In 2026, consent is part of performance resilience.

Does this apply beyond Google?

Yes.

While Consent Mode is Google-led, the underlying principle applies across the stack:

• Meta supports consent via its own APIs
• Other platforms increasingly expect explicit consent signals
• Server-side tagging setups often centralise consent enforcement across vendors

Treating consent as “just a Google thing” is a common, and costly, mistake.

What we expect next

Looking ahead, Australian businesses should plan for:

• Stronger enforcement, not just guidance
• Greater scrutiny of how consent is implemented, not just whether it exists
• Increased reliance on modelled and aggregated measurement
• Less tolerance for opaque data flows and unmanaged tags

The direction of travel is clear: privacy governance is becoming operational, not theoretical.

Louder’s recommendation

• Treat Consent Mode as core marketing infrastructure, not a compliance add-on.
• Implement Consent Mode v2 correctly and consistently across all properties.
• Align consent logic across Google, Meta and other platforms.
• Invest in server-side tagging and governance to future-proof measurement.
• Get comfortable operating with modelled data, not perfect visibility.
• Appoint a clear internal privacy owner responsible for consented data collection, platform implementation and staying across privacy legislation updates.

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