FAQ

This guide helps you to set up the WordPress GDPR Consent plugin in combination with Google Tag Manager. It will allow your visitors to enable/disable (allow/disallow) tags from Google Tag Manager, by accepting/rejecting consents that are set up in your WordPress website using the GDPR Consent Pro Plugin.

Introduction

Google Tag Manager allows organizations to centrally manage the loading of external scripts into a website. Also, the setup of such external services is also outsourced to parties that arrange this activity in its entirety for an organization. From the perspective of the AVG, it is important to have a consent mechanism on a website that can then instruct the Google Tag Manager which consents have or have not been given.

In a nutshell

The GDPR consent plugin allows you to set up consents that visitors can agree to. The plugin places a cookie in the visitor’s browser. This cookie contains ID numbers corresponding to consents given.

In a nutshell

1. Setting up consents in GDPR Consent Plugin

In the GDPR plugin, set up consents that you want to enter. If needed, please read our instructions on how to set up consents.

2. Note the ID numbers of the consents created

When editing a consent in the administration environment of the WordPress website, the ID number can be seen in the address bar of that consent page. Write down the corresponding ID number for each Consent, we will need this later in the Tag Manager.

3. Reading out the consent cookie

The Google Tag Manager can read cookies from the site in which the Tag Manager is loaded.

1. In the Tag Manager, go to ‘Variables’.
2. Add a new ‘User-defined’ variable of type ‘Direct Cookie’
3. Give this variable a logical name (e.g. GDPR Consent)
4. In the ‘Cookie Name’set the name of the cookie as used on the site. By default, it is ‘gdprc_consents_1’*
5. Save the variable.

*Please note! With WordPress multi sites, a cookie will be set for each site. The name of the cookie will then be ‘gdprc_consents_’ supplemented by the ID number of the WordPress website within the multisite installation.

4. Creating triggers for consents

In order for the Tag Manager to recognize whether a consent has been issued, we first set up a number of triggers corresponding to the various consents set up on the website.

1. In the Tag Manager, go to ‘Triggers’
2. Add a new trigger of type ‘Page view’
3. Name the trigger after the targeted consent (e.g. ‘Consent – Personalized ads’)
4. Choose to activate this trigger only for ‘Some page view’ so that a condition can be specified.
5. In the first field, choose the created variable from the previous step
6. In the second field, choose ‘matches RegEx’
7. In the third field, enter the following formula: (?:^||W)XXXX(?:$||W)
   1. Here you replace the XXXX with the number of the consent on which you want to test that consent was issued.
   2. If this website is multilingual, then there is a consent number for each language, for each consent. in this case, replace the XXXX with the consent numbers for each language, separated by a vertical line. This will make this trigger go off regardless of the language the site is visited in.

Repeat until a trigger has been established per consent.

5. Replace existing triggers with trigger groups

In practice, all active TagManagers are set up to have one trigger per existing Tag. Now, however, more conditions need to be tested before a Tag can be used; both the place where the Tag would fire and whether permission to do so has been given.

This means trigger groups need to be created; in fact, a trigger group can include multiple triggers (conditions) that all need to be true before the trigger becomes active, and a script is loaded for the website visitor.

1. In the TagManager, go to ‘Triggers’.
2. Add a new trigger of type ‘Trigger group’.
3. Name the trigger after the intended Tag (e.g. ‘Triggergroup hotjar’).
4. Add at least the trigger for the consent required to be allowed to load this Tag.
5. Add any other triggers that may be true before this trigger group goes off.

With a trigger group, all triggers must be true. This becomes visible because there is the word ‘AND’ between the triggers. (If you set this up for a normal trigger, the word ‘OR’ applies – in other words, one or more conditions are then true to fire a trigger).

If you would like to translate the backend, you can use Loco Translate.

Do you want the frontend translated of your privacy setting page, you could use WordPress Multi language plugin (WPML), and the consents you add can be written in any language you like.

If you want to hide a specific consent box on a page but do not want to delete the whole consent, you can if you add this short code widget=”false” to the [gdpr_consent_embed ids=”3,4″ so it ends up looking like this [gdpr_consent_embed ids=”3,4″ widget=”false”],
You can change the display text on the gdpr consent settings page.

how it looks on the front

Content that is embedded in your website should in certain cases not be shown untill a consent has been given. This concerns content like Iframes, YouTube movies or forms from HubSpot or LinkedIn. For these cases you can use a shortcode that will not display the content between the start and end tag unless a certain consent is given.

Use the following shortcode to exclude content;

[gdpr_consent_embed ids=’345′]  -content goes here- [/gdpr_consent_embed]

The above example will not show its content if consent with the id ‘345’ has not been given. Instead of the content, the shortcode will show the required consent and allow a visitor to agree to the consent on the spot. Once the consent has been given the page will reload and the embedded content will be shown.

How do I get the “ids” in this shortcode
The ID in the shortcode can be acquired by opening the editscreen of the consent you wish to show and copying the ID from the bowser’s address bar. The number you need comes after “?post=”.

Your users will want to be able to choose between the different consents that your website provides. The plugin comes with a shortcode that you can place in a pages content. The shortcode will then display an overview of the available consents, which settings they have per consent and an option to ‘forget’ the consents.

Place the following shortcode in a page to display the consents dialog:
[gdpr_consent_settings]

Notes

• Set up at least one consent, or the dialog will not show anything
• Once you have made this page, be sure to add a link to your footer (or visibly anywhere else) so visitors can find the page again to change their consents.

If you want to show a placeholder instead of the consent box on your page, place this short code [gdpr_consent_inactive_content] before the closing shortode [/gdpr_consent_embed] and between these two short codes place the content you would like to show when consent is not given.

If the consent bar doesn’t seem responsive, this might be caused by CSS of the active theme or a plugin. To force the bar to size properly, you can use this CSS snippet in your theme customizer, child theme CSS file, or at any other decent spot:

#gdprc_bar .container {
width: 100% !important;
}


As of version 1.3.4 custom CSS can be added like the above snippet. The bar (and consent screen) can also be styled according to corporate branding.

If you use version 1.2.6. or higher, use this code in your css-file :

.gdprc_item__icon {
display: none;
}