What is Google Consent Mode v2, and what does it change on Shopify?

By the HonestTag team · Published October 24, 2026

Consent Mode sounds like legal homework. It also changes how many of your conversions Google measures, and how many it models.

What it is

Google puts it in one line: "Consent mode lets you communicate your users' cookie or app identifier consent status to Google. Tags adjust their behavior and respect users' choices." It also says: "Consent mode doesn't provide a consent banner or widget" (Google Ads Help).

Version 2 is the update Google describes as "updated in November, 2023 and now contains two additional parameters" (Google for Developers).

The four signals

• ad_storage: "Enables storage, such as cookies (web) or device identifiers (apps), related to advertising."
• analytics_storage: the same, "related to analytics."
• ad_user_data (new in v2): "Sets consent for sending user data to Google for online advertising purposes."
• ad_personalization (new in v2): "Sets consent for personalized advertising."

Definitions from Google for Developers.

Basic or advanced

• Basic: Google's tags do not load until the visitor interacts with the banner, and nothing is sent before that. When the visitor declines, Google says "no data is transferred to Google at all, not even the consent status," and its conversion modeling falls back to "a general model."
• Advanced: "While consent is denied, the Google tags send cookieless pings." Google says this gives "an advertiser-specific model as opposed to a general model."

Both from Google Ads Help. Modeled conversions are Google's estimates. They are not orders your store can point to.

Who needs it

Google's EU user consent policy asks for consent from "end users in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland" (Google). For tags, Google says: "If a user from the EEA is using your website or app and you measure user behavior with Google tags, you need to pass through end-user consent choices to Google" (Tag Manager Help).

Why conversions drop after a banner goes in

• Declines change what Google gets. In basic mode a decline sends Google nothing; in advanced mode, cookieless pings. Google says ad_user_data "is required for measurement use cases, such as enhanced conversions and tag-based conversion tracking" (Google Ads Help).
• Defaults matter. Shopify says that in regions set to require consent, "non-essential purposes are not allowed by default until consent is given" (shopify.dev). Elsewhere, Shopify allows those purposes by default.
• Check your orders first. If your Shopify order count held steady, what dropped is what Google can measure and credit, not your sales. Cookie banners and conversions works through the counts.

What a merchant can do

1. Use a banner that records choices through Shopify's Customer Privacy API. Shopify says its pixel manager "will only load your pixel if there is visitor permission for all of the settings that your pixels declares as required" (shopify.dev).
2. Record consent only when the visitor accepts or declines. Shopify says it should be recorded only on a visitor interaction "and never done automatically on behalf of the visitor" (shopify.dev).
3. Check which regions your Shopify privacy settings ask for consent in.
4. Judge Google Ads against your Shopify orders, not against last month's Google numbers, after the banner changes.

What HonestTag does

• The pixel follows Shopify's Customer Privacy API. An explicit refusal stops it: no visitor record, no ad click tied to the shopper.
• EU, EEA, UK and Swiss orders with no visitor record are not sent to ad platforms, unless you asked HonestTag in writing to turn that gate off because you collect consent elsewhere.
• Where a visitor record exists, a grant goes to Google as Consent Mode v2 signals: an explicit grant, or Shopify reporting consent given where your privacy settings require it. Any other conversion that is sent carries its consent state as unknown, never claimed as granted. Outside the EU, EEA, UK and Switzerland, an order with no visitor record can still be sent on what it carries, such as a hashed email.
• Each delivery's order record shows the region, the consent state recorded, and whether a grant is on record and what it rests on, so you can check what was applied.

The exact rules are in the server-side delivery docs and our privacy policy.

Frequently asked questions