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Getting Started With Consent

DataGrail Consent is an integrated Consent Management Platform (CMP) solution that integrates directly with Google Tag Manager to simplify and automate compliance with cookie and tracking script opt-in/opt-out. Your privacy and marketing team will use Consent to:

  • Automatically display different consent options and banner copy depending on the user’s region and corresponding regulation
  • Update policies and copy without any developer intervention required
  • Identify scripts that may pose a compliance risk and audit new scripts to determine whether they are exempt from consent opt-out
  • Fully customize your consent banner to match your brand
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This document covers the purpose of CMPs, our Google Tag Manager integration, and how to set up DataGrail Consent for your website. DataGrail Consent is currently in beta for select customers. Reach out to your Customer Success Manager or Account Executive for more information.

DataGrail Consent automates the collection and processing of your end user's consent preferences when visiting your website. As the privacy regulatory landscape continues to change, DataGrail provides an integrated solution that ensures you are up-to-date and compliant with new frameworks and revisions to existing ones, like the GDPR and CPRA. DataGrail's Consent offering provides an easy to use experience for privacy managers and operators applying these frameworks to your websites. Additionally, this solution makes it easy for developers to set up the Consent module and manage the execution of tracking scripts based on an end user's preferences.

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a tag management system (TMS) that manages the execution of tags, which are snippets of code that execute based on events that occur while your experience runs for end users. DataGrail Consent reads the tags defined in GTM that manage the execution of scripts that have Consent implications behind them, and then apply the Consent preferences set by users against those tags. DataGrail Consent also creates a tag, or its own script, to deploy the UI for end users to provide their Consent preferences and stop any scripts (tags) from running on the site depending on these preferences.

At this time, DataGrail Consent requires Google Tag Manager to be running on your site to serve the banner UI to data subjects visiting your site.

What if I have services embedded within my website's code, or otherwise not managed by Google Tag Manager?​

DataGrail Consent supports management of scripts not set up within Google Tag Manager using a tool called ScriptControl. You can learn more about managing inline scripts here.

tip

Are you a Privacy Manager looking to better understand the different mechanisms for retrieving consent for a data subject?

Check out DataGrail Consent For Privacy Managers to learn more about these different consent mechanisms and how DataGrail helps automatically support them!

Getting a consent banner deployed on your site is as easy as integrating Google Tag Manager, categorizing relevant services, and letting DataGrail handle the rest.

Prerequisites​

  • You have a Google Tag Manager account setup and connected to your website. For more information on Google Tag Manager, see the following documentation. You must have publish permissions in your Google Tag Manager environment to connect to DataGrail using our supported Google Tag Manager integration.
  • You manage all tracking scripts via Google Tag Manager as individual tags. You may want to clean up the names of these tags, as they are read directly by our tool and surfaced to end users. For more information, see the following.
  • Your DataGrail account has been provisioned for Consent. Speak to your Customer Success Manager for more information on adding the Consent product to your account.
  • You have request policy frameworks created in your DataGrail environment. Speak to your CS member for support.
  • You have the Consent Management Admin or Consent Management Edit role in DataGrail. This is required to configure your Consent and Banner settings within the app. The Connections Manager role is also required to establish the connection to Google Tag Manager.

Setup Overview​

  1. Confirm Google Tag Manager permissions
  2. Set up the Google Tag Manager integration in DataGrail
  3. Review the categories and set them up according to your policies
  4. Review and update Categories
  5. Publish your banner

Step 1: Confirm Google Tag Manager permissions​

You will be authenticating from DataGrail to Google Tag Manager, using a Google account. This account must have Publish permissions on the Container you wish to manage.

  1. Select the container, and click on the menu to the right

    Manage Accounts

  2. You can either edit your existing user, or add a new user, but ensure that the user has the Publish permission:

    Container Permissions

Step 2: Connect Google Tag Manager​

  1. Log in to DataGrail.

  2. Navigate to the Consent Management tab in the sidebar.

  3. Select Add Google Tag Manager.

    Add Tag Manager

  4. Once you click Add Google Tag Manager, you will be asked to Name the integration. There will also be two checkboxes under "Enabled Capabilities." To enable consent management, you must select the Consent Tag Management capability.

    Integration Capabilities

  5. Log in through your SSO provider to your Google account. You will be asked to review the required permissions for Consent Management. Select Allow.

  6. Navigate back to the Consent Management page.

Step 3: Connect Containers to DataGrail​

The next prompt will ask you to select a container to manage. Selected containers will be used for service categorization and cookie banner deployment.

  1. Click Add Containers.

    Add Containers

  2. Select the containers you would like to manage through DataGrail.

    Select Containers

Once your containers are selected, you will be redirected to a page showing all the tags from Google Tag Manager. The platform will include all recognized tags, organized by container.

Tags

Step 4: Categorize Services​

  1. Navigate to the Tracking Services tab.

    Tracking Services

  2. You will want to review the services that have been automatically categorized to ensure that those services meet the definitions of each category.

  3. You can filter the list by status or category. There will always be a default category for "uncategorized" for any services that need to be categorized.

    Uncategorized Services

    When publishing, uncategorized services will not be modified from their current state in Google Tag Manager

  4. To select a service to categorize, click the checkbox on the left side of the table row. Once this is clicked, an Assign Category button will appear.

    Assign Category

  5. The Assign Category button will open a list of the categories you have configured. Clicking a category will assign it to all of the services currently selected.

    Assign Category 2

Step 5: Customize The Banner​

Use DataGrail's editor to modify the appearance of your banner, if desired. The banner's appearance, the banner text, and the behavior of the banner in each legal jurisdiction can be customized. If you'd like further customization options, you can follow this guide to use CSS to make the banner match your site's look and feel.

Step 6: Publish updates to your Google Tag Manager Container(s) (Sites)​

Each time you make updates to Consent, including changes made as a part of this initial setup, you must click the publish button to have these changes pushed to your website(s). Publishing occurs in the background, so you can close the browser window when a publishing job starts and return to the window to see the results later.

  1. Click Publish in the top right-hand corner of the screen. This opens a preview describing the changes that will be applied.

    Publish 1

  2. Click Publish at the bottom of the preview window to send these changes to Google Tag Manager. The preview content will be replaced by a live view listing the publishing actions being taken. When the process is complete, you can review it by going to your website to see the banner.

    Publish 2

You can stop the publishing process in case you want to make additional changes, or hold back any updates from being visible on your site(s). Any in flight changes will be rolled back.

In the unfortunate and rare case of an error, no updates will be pushed to the associated Google Tag Manager container. You can try publishing again to see if that resolves the issue, or contact our support team so we can help.

Additional Capabilities​

After setting up Datagrail Consent, you may want to be aware of additional capabilities our product offers.

Most policies require your experience to allow for end users to update their Consent preferences if they choose. You may also want to provide users the ability to supply their Consent preference, even if it wasn't first presented to them (as is the case with CPRA, which is an implied consent privacy framework).

Web developers can use the following JavaScript events to trigger the Consent banner from appearing on the site. This can be useful for testing the banner on your site as well:

window.DG_BANNER_API.showConsentBanner();

window.DG_BANNER_API.hideConsentBanner();

Here's specific HTML code that you can add to your site in your privacy policy or similar page for triggering the Consent banner for end users:

<a href="#" onclick="window.DG_BANNER_API.showConsentBanner();">
  Manage consent choices
</a>

What happens when you click "publish" in the DataGrail application?​

Publishing consent.js files​

We save a new version of your configuration, and we use that version id as part of the publishing process.

We build a custom copy of consent.js that has the requested configuration in it, by location. This file is then uploaded, using the format:

/<customer_id>/<version_id>/consent.js

Example:

https://api.consentjs.datagrail.io/consent/d4735e3a265e16eee03a59718b9b5d03019c07d8b6c51f92da3a668eec13ab35/f00384c7-6558-2891-80f6-dbc6cca0de0d/consent.js

Publishing to Google Tag Manager​

The above URL is used when publishing to Google Tag Manager.

Steps to publish:

  1. Create a Workspace in Google Tag Manager, using the current published version, and use that for the following changes.

  2. Create or update the DataGrail Consent Template. This contains the code that will initialize Google Tag Manager Consent Mode, and will pre-block appropriate tags according to the policies configured in DataGrail.

  3. Create or update the Datagrail Consent Tag. This will be configured with the URL from the previous section, and the URL changes on every publish. This provides a good mix of strong and long-lasting caching while being able to immediately force changes upon publish (no waiting on cache invalidation: when published, every new request will receive the current configuration).

    Consent Tags

  4. Publish the workspace (which will remove the workspace) as a new version.

    1. If a Google Tag Manager user happens to be doing other edits in a different workspace, this publish process will not interrupt that. When that workspace is published, the user will be guided through the Resolve Conflicts process (look for the Resolve Conflicts section). This will allow merging of the two versions.

Further reading​

To better understand consent management within and beyond DataGrail, we recommend these resources:

 

Need help?
If you have any questions, please reach out to your dedicated CSM or contact us at support@datagrail.io.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this message does not constitute as legal advice. We would advise seeking professional counsel before acting on or interpreting any material.