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knowledge base/paid advertising
glossary term

Consent Mode & Missing Conversions

A misconfigured cookie-consent banner can silently block conversion tracking, and it looks just like a platform problem.

What it means

If your site (especially for EU visitors) uses a consent banner that controls whether tracking tags are allowed to load, a bug in that banner's setup can prevent Google's tags from firing until (or even after) someone interacts with it. When that happens, conversions quietly stop being recorded — not because ads stopped working, but because the site never let the tracking tag run.

Why it matters

This failure looks identical to a platform-side tracking or policy problem, but the fix lives in your site's consent-banner tool, not in your ad account. If conversions dropped sharply for visitors in a specific region (particularly the EU) while everything else looks unchanged, a consent-tool misconfiguration is worth ruling out before assuming the ad platform broke something.

ask datanephew

My conversions dropped specifically for EU visitors — is that a tracking bug?

Ask datanephew to check your recent conversion activity by region. A region-specific drop, especially in the EU, points toward a consent-banner configuration issue on your site rather than a platform-side problem.

How do I know if this is a consent issue versus something else?

Datanephew can show you that conversion recording has stopped and roughly when, but confirming and fixing a consent-tool misconfiguration happens in your site's own consent-management settings.