What is the most annoying part of websites these days? Yes! The cookie banner! At best, you can easily dismiss the banner, at worst, you can only accept everything, or choose to click “manage options”, deselect all illegally preselected categories, and decline then. Horrible! If you think about it, if you’re a webshop, this is the worst possible user experience. You should know that it’s not legal to not have an option that allows the user to decline tracking on marketing level with one click. So there are two possibilities then:
- The banner is correctly configured, and the user can easily decline (still terrible, but the best of all bad scenarios)
- The banner is configured to prevent users from easily declining. Not legal, so also bad practice.
Cookie banners are useless
In the first case, about 98% of your users will simply decline. Why should they otherwise? Contrary to what most cookie banners say, on most websites I’ve seen it does not harm the user experience to decline. The exception being possibly that if you decline, you can’t see YouTube videos that might be embedded on the website. The second case speaks for itself: it’s not legal, so you shouldn’t do it.
So practically speaking, we only have one option to set up a cookie banner: a cookie banner that most users decline anyway. So if you don’t have the data anyway, why bother setting up a cookiebanner? Apart from statistical data, the only reason I can think of right now (there probably are more, just let me know which ones!): The site contains social media, like YouTube, Facebook or Twitter embeds.
But those embeds can be handled with a placeholder. With most cookiebanner solutions these embeds are replaced with a placeholder, and if you click on the placeholder (which serves as a cookie banner in its own right) the embed loads. As long as you inform the user on this placeholder about the privacy implications, this is perfectly according to the privacy laws I know!
So that leaves the statistics. Why not set up your site with anonymous statistics, you can even set it to cookieless, although I’m not sure cookieless tracking improves matters: users are also tracked anonymously, but with cookies it’s easier for the user to delete the data. Funny thing that, cookies. They’re all hated, but actually give more control than cookieless solutions. Anyway.
Setting up your site without a cookie banner, no tools
This is the easiest. You need to have a site without social media embeds. A link to a social media account is fine! So the only non functional cookies you see on your site should be things like language or currency selector cookies or cart cookies. Maybe security or payment processing, stuff like that. Then you set up your favorite statistics tool, which is of course Burst Statistics :). Data is stored on your own server only, and all data is anonymized. In a lot of countries this is fine. In some countries even for anonymous self hosted statistical data consent is required. Quite possibly these websites are not at the forefront of attention: there are so much blatant violations of privacy laws, it would be crazy if they would go after the websites doing it nearly perfect, just not 100% perfect. That’s an opinion that is, not a fact.
Steps to configure:
- Install Burst Statistics
- Remove any social media, or services/tools that place marketing cookies
Configuring your site without a cookie banner, using Complianz
If you have social embeds, like YouTube for example, you can also handle this without a cookiebanner. Follow the following steps:
- Install Burst Statistics for you analytics.
- Install Complianz (There’s no affiliation with Complianz, we built it, but it’s not part of our company anymore. However, it still works fine for this purpose).
- Using the wizard in Complianz, configure your website. Make sure you select YouTube as one of your services (or any other embeds you have on your website).
- In the “statistics configuration” step, select “no” on the question “Do you want to ask consent for statistics”.
- In the ‘finish’ step, select ‘enable cookie blocker’. Also select ‘no’ on the question “Do you want to enable the cookie banner”. There seems to be a bug in Complianz, because you also need to disable the cookie banner in the cookie banner wysiwyg settings. Select “disable cookie banner” there as well.
If you now visit your site, you will see that there is no cookie banner, but YouTube is blocked. The user can accept cookies by simply clicking on the placeholder.
The user also should be able to revoke consent. The easiest way to do this is to add a simple button. You can do this below the YouTube video for example, or you can do this in the footer. It should be easy to find and clearly visible. Use the following HTML:
<button class="cmplz-deny cmplz-revoke-custom">Revoke</button>
Of you course you can style it to your liking. Just leave the current classes in place. You can also change the text to anything you want.
Need help settings this up? Questions? Don’t hesitate to contact us, or post an item on the forum.