How To: Set Up Your Cookie Consent Banner

Why do you need a cookie consent banner?

Under the GDPR, visitors to your website must opt in to allow cookies before your company may place cookies onto their browser. Additionally, as more data privacy laws arise around the globe, it will be important for your business to support consumer choice to allow or not-allow tracking cookies to monitor their online behavior.

If you're using any sort of advertising trackers on your marketing or branded websites, you are allowing third-party companies to place a cookie onto your site visitors' browsers, which will process their activity to create audiences lists for the purpose of targeted advertising on social media and around the internet.

Cookie Consent Banner Features

Default to opt in consent: your site visitors will need to press "Accept" before your site adds cookies to the browser
Custom styling: Make the banner match your site by adding your brand's color scheme
Custom copy: Customizable button text and text on buttons and content
EU-Only mode: You can select to show the banner to all site visitors or only to site visitors who are in the EU
Cookie categorization: Select which cookies you want to categorize as necessary, performance, analytics, advertising.
Please note that Ethyca's Cookie Consent Banner is designed to only remove cookies from the primary domain (where the Cookie Consent Banner is configured). The banner will not have any effect on cookies set by third-party domains.

How to Configure Your Cookie Banner

Configuring your custom cookie consent banner for your website is done in 3 easy steps, right from your control panel. You can find your cookie consent configurations under Admin Settings >> Cookie Consent.

Step 1: Configure the look & feel of your banner

On the first tab, you can configure the style of your banner with a number of style options.

Banner Text: This is the banner text that the site visitor will see upon landing on your website

Button Options: Under the GDPR, the user is required to accept all cookies prior to your site placing them on the browser. The default option is two buttons, and you have the option to add a third button if you'd like to give the user more control. We recommend configuring the following options:

Accept All Cookies: This button action will accept all cookies on your site.
Customize Cookies: This button action will allow the user to toggle which categories of cookies they want to turn on and off. This is often given a descriptive label such as "Cookie Settings".

Banner Design: You can select the two colors for your banner, as well as where the banner is positioned on your website. Additionally, you can write your own CSS on top of the base CSS included in our script.

EU-Only Mode: Gives you geographic specificity to ONLY display the banner to your EU site visitors.

Step 2: Define how you categorize cookies

On the second tab, you'll be able to customize the second layer of cookie controls, which is the cookie selection. This is where you'll explain to your site visitors why you use each category of cookies.

Description: You will see options for four cookie categories: "Strictly Necessary", "Performance", "Product Analytics & Tracking", and "Advertising & Data sales". Provide a succinct description for each category to explain what these cookies are for on your site.

Cookies: In the "Cookies" section of each category, provide a comma delimited list of the cookies that apply to this category.

Step 3: Install the code to your website

The final step is to install the javascript onto your website so we can show your cookie banner to your site visitors.

On the third tab, you'll see a static js code block. Copy the contents and paste directly into the global <head> tag of the website on which you want the cookie banner to show. This code will not change as you're making changes to the other two tabs.

No matter your website generator, or website hosting, we highly recommend the following:

Put the Ethyca cookie banner code as close to the front of the global <head> tag as possible
Pad the code with a comment of your choosing. For example:

Verifying Your Setup

After adding the javascript to your site, your website code should look like this:

And when you visit your branded website, it should look like this:

If you have any questions at all about the setup of the cookie consent banner on your website, please reach out to [email protected]