As more and more privacy laws and data protection are coming into force around the world, the demand for consent management platforms is increasing rapidly. A few examples of this kind of regulation are the European GDPR, the Brazilian LGPD and the US Californian CCPA. This is where the CookieFirst consent management platform comes in. The SaaS tool offers automated cookie scan, a cookie policy generator, third party script management, integration with Google Tag Manager and much more.
CookieFirst aims to offer easy and effective solutions for website compliance. Read more below if you are interested in making your website compliant with the cookie consent management platform CookieFirst!
Consent Management compliant with data protection laws.
As you might have read, stricter privacy laws and regulations have been introduced in the past few years. Therefore the need for Consent Management Platforms (CMP’s) took off. Businesses all around the world are now in need of a CMP for their website compliance.
In the early days, you would only see a non-compliant cookie notice on most websites. Data protection laws and privacy regulations like the European GDPR, the ePrivacy Regulation, the Brazilian LGPD and the CCPA in the United States (State of California) now have more strict requirements on the way that businesses collect and process personal data. These laws could also be interpreted differently per member state.
In countries like Spain, France and Italy the GDPR is referred to as the RGPD, and in Germany this regulation is called the Datenschutz-Grundverordnung (DSGVO). In the Netherlands it is called the Algemene Verordening Gegevensbescherming or AVG in short.
Compliance to these laws in the broadest sense could be complex. But then there are also ‘slight’ differences between the requirements of local governments. Also the fact that these regulations are constantly changing and evolving combined with the factors named in the above can make it difficult to make your website fully compliant.
The most strict rules in these requirements are about third party tracking (tracking cookies and tracking scripts). Mostly this is related to digital advertising techniques like retargeting / remarketing or user profiling. But also for using Google Analytics GDPR wise. Many organizations use these techniques in order to optimize their conversion rate and (online) sales. In order to make the use of these processes compliant to current cookie consent laws, cookie consent management platforms were introduced. These systems enable businesses to easily manage their cookie consent, their third party scripts and other features for becoming compliant.
First the CMP’s were all about providing the basics for making websites compliant. One of the first CMP’s and maybe the most well-known one is Cookiebot. But also there is Didomi, Usercentrics, CookiePro, CookieYes, Borlabs Cookie and for example Iubenda. In the early stages these platforms were far from perfect. Banner design was very limited (resulting in ugly cookie banners), local requirement options were very limited and performance was a little poor.
Website performance was affected as these systems also slowed down website load time. Business owners needed to make the difficult choice between website compliance with privacy laws and website performance.
The UI of these platforms in the early stages was a bit unclear or even confusing.
So at the time handling cookie consent management and cookie policy management was a bit more hassle than it is now, even with a CMP at your disposal.
That called for a new generation of consent management platform that is built for both multidisciplinary company staff and external web agencies to work with.
If you would like to know more about different cookies then read the article: What are cookies ?
Consent Management Platform (CMP) for Cookie Consent
With the earlier paragraphs in mind, you can imagine that among organizations the demand for a proper cookie consent management platform grew drastically. The platform needed to be easy in use and implementation, but also leave website performance intact as much as possible.
Third party scripts need to be managed and categorized easily and quickly and for example the cookie banner and preference panel need to have more flexibility in terms of styling and configuration. It was time for a new consent management platform: CookieFirst.
The CookieFirst CMP solution is a cloud-based SaaS tool designed to make complying with regulations simple and convenient. It is an all-in-one consent management platform that allows you to easily manage your cookie policies, third-party tracking, and more in a user-friendly way.
The CookieFirst all-in-one Cookie Consent tool is a SaaS solution that makes compliance with the data protection laws convenient and efficient. The platform offers an automatic cookie policy generator, third party script management and a lot of custom styling and custom configuration options that makes website compliance less of a burden.
Below we have listed a couple of main features of the CookieFirst CMP:
- Consent banner and panel in 40+ languages
- Advanced configuration and styling options (Cookie banner and Preferences panel)
- Third-party scripts management
- Automated periodic cookie scans
- Cookie policy generator (automated)
- JavaScript API for cookie banners created from scratch
- WordPress Cookie Consent and other plugins and integrations
- User consent statistics
- Audit trails to record proof of consent
- Re-consent tools for achieving higher opt-in rates
With the Google Tag Manager integration that CookieFirst offers it is also possible to enable Google Consent Mode. A quick way to do this is to use the Google Tag Manager Template from the Community Gallery. Starting in March 2024, Google mandates the implementation of Google Consent Mode version 2 for the use of its services such as Google Analytics and conversion tracking on websites. As a gatekeeper under the European Digital Markets Act (DMA), Google needer to launch this updated version of Google Consent Mode.
These features as listed above are just a few core features that the CookieFirst CMP is all about. The CookieFirst team constantly monitors the current state of global and local requirements in the privacy- and data protection laws and quickly identifies which changes need to be incorporated in the platform. The CookieFirst CMP is kept up-to-date accordingly in order to ensure that your organization can stay compliant.
Two of the main features of the Cookiefirst consent solution are third party script management and the multilingual cookie policy generator. Let’s explore these features more closely.
Third-Party Script Management
The most important feature is third party script management. In order to become compliant website visitors must give their consent before third party (tracking) scripts are being loaded during the session. So these scripts must be blocked from executing before consent has been obtained.
The CookieFirst platform offers multiple ways of ‘managing’ these scripts so they can be used in a compliant way. Most e-commerce websites, but also corporate websites, use Google Tag Manager for third party script and tag management. CookieFirst integrates with the GTM solution and can be combined with Google Consent Mode. But also you can use the CookieFirst Tag Manager or you can just alter and connect your hard coded scripts. If you would like to learn more about this then take a look at the CookieFirst support documentation.
Cookie Policy Generator (to embed in your website)
Two legal documents that you would need for your website are the privacy policy and the cookie policy. So if you already use a privacy policy generator, an automatically generated cookie policy is a great addition to making your website compliant to data privacy laws.
It could be challenging to make a cookie policy for your website, and even more cumbersome to keep it up-to-date. For this purpose the CookieFirst platform offers a cookie policy generator that keeps your cookie policy updated with every website scan.
The default text is provided in more than 40 languages. The system automatically detects the user’s browser language and shows the cookie banner, the preferences panel and the cookie policy in the language of the user’s browser preferences. But if you would like to override this default setting it is also possible to override this language setting and force a specific language to load on a certain part of the website.
Reseller model and affiliate programs
As many organizations work with external teams and agencies for operating their websites, their online marketing activities and legal issues, CookieFirst offers several options for partnering up. The direct reseller model and the affiliate program can be interesting for companies that offer services like web development, online marketing and consultancy like web agencies, privacy lawyers and data protection officers (DPOs) or DPO as a Service companies.
