Quantcast Choice is a popular Consent Management Platform (CMP) for publishers for good reasons. It’s well proven, easy to set-up, free to use and utilises the IAB Consent Management Framework.
That framework ensures that the consent users give is passed to every demand partner who has also adopted the standard framework. The problem that publishers face is that Google aren’t signed up to that framework, so additional steps are needed to ensure that any Google ads served to a user honour that user’s consent preference.
Tying ads behind a yes/no to consent
Quantcast choice now makes it easier to honour user preference and meet Google EU User Consent standards as it now has out of the box compatibility with support for Google’s advertising products.
The simplest solution is to delay showing ads to the user until after consent has been gained. Great! But how do you actually do that?
Firstly, you’ll want to make sure you are not going to serve ads until the user has agreed to your consent popup. To do this we need to use the disableInitialLoad() function within Google’s API.
You’ll need to make sure that the disableInitialLoad() function is before enableServices().
To get the ads to fire after consent is recorded we will use the refresh() function, but more on that later.
Implementation within Quantcast choice CMP
In order for the CMP to perform its duties, we need to link our decision to serve personalized ads with what consent is recorded by the CMP.
To do that we will use the following code, appended to the bottom of the ‘out of the box’ Quantcast choice code:
How does this work?
Once the CMP has loaded, this extra snippet will make the decision on whether or not personalized ads are shown.
If the CMP records a positive result and the user has given their consent for personalized ads, the refresh() function is called, overriding the previous disableInitialLoad() function and your Ad Manager ad units will fire as normal.
If no consent is given by the user, the CMP will change the request to Ad Manager to only retrieve non-personalized ads using the function: setRequestNonPersonalizedAds(1).
For more information on the EU User Consent Policy, download our free guide.
After studying Computing at the University of Portsmouth, Zack joined the OKO team in 2018 as a Publisher Development Manager and achieved his GCPP certification shortly after. As a Platform Specialist, Zack’s role is to manage new publisher integrations, carry out data analysis and provide technical problem solving and support.
Any update for TCF 2.0?
AdX now supports TCF2.0 natively. We do need to update this post for those who wish to serve their own ads and comply with given consents though.
Hi Zack,
Do you have a tutorial for implementing TCF 2.0 with Adsense via Adinserter plugin?
Hi Sarang, not yet. Here is the easy way though: Use Quantcast choice. Register for free, set-up your account then add their snippet to your site via whatever means you want (could be adinserter, could add into the template or anything else). Tutorial to follow, but it will be a short one as it is very simple!
do you have an update version for v2.0?
Hi Saffa. Not yet. We’er working on this now. In short though, if you use the newest version of Quantcast choice you do not need to do these extra steps. Google now support TCF (version 2.0+) so adding any TCF 2.0 CMP (like Quantcast Choice) will solve the issue natively.
Hi Mat, thank you for the response. We have TCF 2.0 CMP from Quantcast Choice on several sites and none stop the ads to wait for consent or even pass the details as we get GAM errors so I hope in time this will be the case but as of today it’s not working as it should.
That is what we are finding too, lots of 2.1a errors from Google as regardless of what is supposed to happen, the ads are clearly firing before Quantcast Choice has worked its magic.
I am guessing a variant of the code above but using __tcfapi instead of __cmp could be produced which should at least in theory solve the problem.
Hello,
if I use Adsense through Ad Manager, will this implementation work for Adsense too?
Thanks
Hi Pablo,
This setup is based on GPT units serving AdX demand in GAM.
It will depend heavily on how you serve AdSense through your ad units.
The function: setRequestNonPersonalizedAds(1) is also usable with AdSense, more info can be found here: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/7670312?hl=en-GB
However, as the above implementation is based on GPT tags showing AdX demand I can’t guarantee the above implementation will work for AdSense.
Hi Zack,
thank you for the above. I just had a quick question. If we are having the IAB TCF, Lotame as our DMP, the Quantcast CMP and Ad Manager as our Ad server, does this restrict us selling ads to users coming via DV360?
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated
Hi Ute,
Thanks for getting in touch, if your inventory is going through Google Ad Exchange then you should have no problem targeting users from DV360 as long as you are passing consent through.