Respect privacy and consent, and build for the cookieless future
Respect privacy and consent, and build for the cookieless future
Analytics today is not just a technical setup, it is a legal and ethical one, and getting it wrong is expensive in fines and in trust. If you operate anywhere near Europe (and as a B2B company selling internationally, you do), you are subject to GDPR, the ePrivacy rules and a consent regime that is only tightening. Build your tracking as if consent is mandatory from day one, because for you it effectively is.
Practically, that means analytics and marketing tags wait for consent rather than firing on page load. Use a consent management platform and Google's Consent Mode so that, when a visitor declines, your tags either do not run or run in a privacy-preserving mode, and when they accept, full tracking resumes. The banner is not a cosmetic nuisance to bolt on at the end; it is a gate your whole setup must respect, so you wire it in early, not as an afterthought that breaks everything two days before launch.
Collect less, on purpose. You do not need a visitor's full IP, precise location and a fingerprint to run a healthy B2B funnel; you need enough to answer your measurement plan and no more. Data minimisation is both the law's expectation and good engineering: less personal data captured means less to secure, less to leak, less to explain, and a setup that ages gracefully as rules tighten rather than one you have to gut later.
The ground is also moving under everyone's feet. Third-party cookies are dying, browser privacy defaults are getting stricter, and ad blockers eat a real share of client-side events. The setups that survive this lean on first-party data and server-side tracking: events you collect yourself, on your own domain, fired from your own backend, which you control and which do not depend on a cookie a browser is about to block. Build toward that now and you are not scrambling when the next deprecation lands.
None of this means you track less usefully; it means you track more honestly and more durably. A consent-respecting, first-party, server-anchored setup gives you data you can actually stand behind, to a regulator and to a customer, which in B2B is part of the product, not a tax on it.
INTERVIEW EWOUD: How do you set up consent and Consent Mode for a new venture without the banner breaking the rest of the tracking? Any war stories?
INTERVIEW EWOUD: What is your view on how much the cookieless shift actually changes a B2B analytics setup, and what are you doing now to stay ahead of it?