Consent management is the backbone of data privacy and protection. It verifies that companies are compliant with privacy requirements and data protection laws. Without it, a business risks losing its customer’s trust, receiving fines, and perhaps going to court.
Consent management is essential when collecting, using, and sharing personal customer data. It enables businesses to obtain, record, and manage users’ consent while collecting their data. Consequently, it ensures that people have full control over how their personal data is used.
Consent management matters for every online business since it protects individual rights and freedoms. It enforces organizations to comply with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Moreover, with the increase in cyberattacks, consent management safeguards against data theft and misuse.
In this article, we will introduce you to the consent management platform (CMP) and its benefits. Additionally, we’ll go through how to choose the best CMP before highlighting some of the top tools.
What Is a Consent Management Platform?
A consent management platform assists businesses in adhering to EU regulatory requirements. It enables businesses to get user permission before gathering and processing personal data. The General data protection regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) enforce privacy laws.
When people talk about CMP, it often means transparency and consent framework (TCF) of IAB Europe and the registered consent management platform. IAB & TCF is a framework meant to gain user permission and maintain personal data. These data are collected via vendors and shared with third parties.
By utilizing the IAB TCF (GDPR), companies can ensure that they deal with ad partners that comply with data privacy rules. This increases openness and accountability across the advertising supply chain. It is advantageous for both publishers and the ad partners
How Does A Consent Management Platform Works?
In order to gather and process the user’s data, the CMP will display a pop-up or banner on a website. The decision to accept or reject the request is then up to the user.
The CMP collects user information after receiving authorization from the user and keeps it in the database. However, if users choose to reject, the website cannot collect or manage their data.
The following are the procedures that a consent management platform follows:
- Showing Banners & Popups: The platform displays banners and popups on websites (mobile and desktop). The aim is to inform users about the data the site is collecting and its usage. Users are then provided with an option to give or deny their consent.
- Storing Consents: It stores and manages user-preferred consents in a central database.
- Tracking User Consent: Keeps track of all the user-given consent settings. Also, it updates pertinent information whenever a user selects one.
- Handling Cookies: The platform controls and manages the placement and usage of cookies on users’ devices.
- Maintaining Transparency: It provides full transparency into user data collection and usage.
- Displaying or Blocking Tags: It displays or blocks the usage of tags in marketing or ad channels.
- Monitoring and Reporting: It gives thorough information on user consent settings, which are helpful for compliance and auditing.
Let’s now examine the advantages that websites with consent management solutions can offer to businesses.
Benefits of Consent Management Platform On Businesses
Due to abuse and data breaches, data privacy laws are becoming stricter every day. Consent management tools are thus becoming crucial for commercial organizations.
Online companies can simply gain and maintain user permission to collect and utilize customers’ personal information using CMP software. Ultimately, CMPs are responsible for safeguarding user data and regulatory compliance.
However, the advantages of using a consent management platform are:
- Adhering to the Regulations: A consent management platform enables you to abide by data protection laws (GDPR and CCPA). Using a consent management tool, you can quickly request and document visitors’ permission, giving evidence of compliance.
- Enhanced Transparency: A CMP enables you to be open and honest about the information you gather and use. By being transparent, you can win your visitor’s confidence and enhance their readiness to give you their permission.
- Authority Over Collecting Data: Thanks to the consent management platform, you have complete control over the data you gather about your visitors. You can choose which information to gather and only get the required portion.
- Modifiable Forms: With CMP, you can modify the consent forms that visitors can see. You can customize the forms to meet your specific needs. For example, creating a form to collect more specific information.
- Cookie Control Automation: With a CMP implementation, you can automate cookie control. This includes disabling third-party cookies to prevent data breaches.
- Optimizing User Experience: A consent management platform can significantly boost the user experience because it provides visitors with a user-friendly way to adjust data privacy settings. Therefore, they can quickly understand whether to provide or deny consent.
- Simple Monitoring & Recording: A CMP makes sit easy to record and monitor user-provided data. Hence, it becomes easy to find who consented and which data were granted permission.
How To Choose The Best Consent Management Platform
Choosing the ideal consent management platform for your business may be a difficult undertaking because there are several CMP choices available to meet the diverse needs of various companies.
You must consider your specific requirements, budget, and data protection regulations that you must comply with. However, before deciding on a CMP platform, consider the following common features:
- Consent Form: The option to construct and personalize consent forms that may be presented to visitors. Also, provide options to enable or disable consent forms to refuse or accept the consent for data collection and usage.
- Compliance Administration: The app should guarantee that data protection standards such as GDPR and CCPA are followed.
- Consent Capturing: The app should have the capacity to capture and preserve consent capturing. The data can then be used to demonstrate regulatory compliance and trace who has granted consent.
- Cookie Managing: This refers to the ability to monitor and manage cookies on your website. Also, it should block third-party cookies and regulate the cookies stored on a visitor’s device.
- Analytics and Reporting: The capacity to create reports and analyze the data to monitor consent ratios to discover areas of improvement.
- Data Auditing: The ability to perform audits on consent data to guarantee compliance with regulations.
- Design Flexibility: The option to alter the appearance and style of the consent forms, pop-ups, and other components to coordinate with your website.
- Multi-language support: It should provide multi-language support to ensure visitors from different locations can understand the consent form.
- Integration with different systems: It will link with other systems, including customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platforms.
- User-friendly Interface: It will offer a user-friendly interface that is simple to browse and will make collecting consent easier.
We have compiled some of the best consent management platforms out there to minimize your effort. These consent management solutions will surely assist you in collecting data by ensuring compliance:
Iubenda
Iubenda helps you keep track of the consent and privacy choices made by your users for GDPR and LGPD. It’s easy to store, manage, track, and retrieve consent preferences for each user. It works flawlessly with the forms you use to collect consent and shows you all the records within a dashboard.
Key Features:
- Create and customize cookie consent notices
- Create, customize, and auto-generate Privacy Policy
- Offers tools to manage data protection regulations (GDPR & CCPA)
- Includes analytic and tracking script, which is embeddable on the website
Termly
Next on our list is Termly, a budget-friendly solution that makes data compliance user-friendly. It offers the most comprehensive policy and consent solution in the market. Since data privacy laws are evolving, it maintains transparency in collecting and maintaining customer data.
Key Features:
- Create customizable privacy policy, T&C, Disclaimer, and refund policy
- Advanced cookie consent management tool available
- Get user preference center, auto blocker, language, and banner settings
- Implement consent solutions and policies on your website with one click
- Always up-to-date with the latest privacy policies and data regulations
Clickio
Clickio offers a free consent management platform that is fully approved by the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework v2.0.
With a customizable banner and live reporting of consent rates, Clickio’s CMP makes it easy to respect your users’ privacy and comply with regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA.
Key features
- Free, easy-to-install privacy solution for publishers
- Fast-loading, fully customizable consent banner – available in multiple languages
- Live reporting to help you track users’ preferences and consent rates
- Full support for Google’s TCF integration requirements, including the Additional Consent Mode
- Automatic ad tag pausing to prevent Google TCF errors
- Seamlessly supports Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Onetrust
The necessity of consumer privacy is increasing with the uprising of digital platforms and online businesses. This is where Onetrust comes in with a robust and easy-to-use consent management solution.
This solution makes it easy to capture, centralize, monitor, and sync consent preferences. Thus, the transparency within consumer interactions and data privacy regulations are satisfied.
Key Features:
- Craft & manage cookie consent and banners on websites
- Provides a mobile application for consent management
- Helps organization stays compliant with data protection regulations
- Offers tools to manage third-party vendor risks
- Integrates with APIs, SDKs, data feeds, and more
TermsFeed
TermsFeed is an advanced solution for managing consumer consent, privacy policy, T&C, EULA, and more. This consent management platform is available as a desktop and mobile app, eCommerce, SaaS, and more. The overall cookie management and consent banner creation process are very user-friendly.
Key Features:
- You can create customized legal agreements (T&C, privacy policy, etc.)
- Pre-made legal templates available to assist users
- Displays consent form and agreement in user-preferred language
- Routinely updates available in all the data compliance regulations
- Integrate into different platforms (WordPress and Squarespace, etc.)
Didomi
Consumers are concerned about how their data is being utilized on a website. With Didomi you can maintain data compliance regulations and assure data privacy to your customers. As a result, you can create value by earning customers’ trust and turning privacy into a business opportunity.
Key Features:
- Comply with global data protection regulations and local data protection authorities.
- Offers a technological infrastructure to keep and manage cookie consent.
- Sharable consent data for internal systems and with trusted third parties.
- Get better control over your consent rates and analytics for actionable insights.
Cookiebot is a CMP tool that ensures your website follows data protection regulations to protect users’ data. With this tool, it’s easy to keep track of cookies, and people consent to use them. Moreover, it comes with cutting-edge scanning technology and integrates smoothly with Google Consent mode.
Key Features:
- Next-gen scanning technology that recognizes all cookies and trackers automatically
- Completely configurable cookie consent banner available
- User-friendly widgets that allow users to update their consent anytime
- Cloud-based consent storage capability
- Get cookie consent banner and declaration support with 40+ languages
Usercentrics
Usercentrics claims to be one of the best consent management platforms. It complies with GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, and POPIA compliance for websites and apps. This solution offers some amazing tools that are essential to take full control of user consent.
Key Features:
- Entirely customizable CMP where you can make cookie banners, privacy walls, and more.
- Adaptable to the latest legal requirements.
- To optimize consent, you can implement A/B tests.
- Contextual consent for channels such as Google Maps, YouTube, and more.
- Integrates with some of the best marketing tools, such as MailChimp, Hotjar, and more.
Quantcast
If you are looking for a free consent management platform solution, then Quantcast is your tool. It simplifies consent management by providing access to real-time audience insights through consent.
Key Features:
- Enhanced vendor control and management
- Authorize access to consent data for different user types
- Optimized user interface for high consent rates
- Site owners can view and maintain audit logs
- Supports major data privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA, TCF v2.0 )
- Set privacy preferences for website visitors
Crownpeak
Formerly known as Evidon, Crownpeak is a privacy and & consent management platform solution. This CMP is built for enterprises and complies with all global data privacy regulations.
You can easily implement this solution at your site and get deep insights and enhanced control over data sharing. Furthermore, marketers can maintain customer experience as well as ensure the highest level of compliance.
Key Features:
- Implement this CMP with minimal and even without any code
- Create ideal presets for regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, and more
- Notices are always up-to-date with real-time scans and user data
- Highly customizable notices include templates, languages, device options, and more.
- A consent dashboard is available with a reporting option for data analysis
- Maintains data security and improves the website performance
Clarip
Clarip is yet another CMP tool that will assist your marketing team in meeting data protection rules. The consent form-building tool will help in lead acquisition and consent tracking.
The tool incorporates compliance with the GDPR and CCPA data compliance regulations. It maintains client preferences and allows businesses to get consent for numerous data collecting, sharing, and using.
Key Features:
- Integrates flawlessly with a corporate preference management platform.
- Get user consent while managing preferences across different channels.
- Collet consent information is based on location and behavior.
- The central dashboard offers detailed insight into customers.
- Includes an exporter allowing you to export a list of users who provided consent.
Sirdata
The user-friendly CMP software Sirdata offers a high-end, adaptable solution. It makes it simple for publishers and media firms to comply with data privacy laws on their websites.
After configuring the current banner and partner choices, this CMP can be deployed in minutes. The specifications of the publishers and advertisers are met by this tool, which is constantly updated with the most recent regulations.
Key Features:
- Customize the consent banner with your preferred brand, color, logo, text, and more.
- Publishers’ & recipients’ objectives are served by preventing data breaches.
- It accepts ePrivacy, CCPA, and GDPR-compliant settings.
- Multi-language option with auto language selection option is available.
- Accessible on both desktop and mobile platforms, and it operates in the Google AMP environment.
Final Thoughts
Businesses can move forward without worrying about assuring compliance using CMP software because CMP solutions will handle all the data security compliance regulations, including GDPR, CCPA, and other laws.
Moreover, the customers will feel secure about their data when the right CMP tool is implemented in a website. So, Enforcing data privacy regulations is mandatory no matter how much data you collect for advertising and marketing purposes.
Choosing the best consent management platform for your organization depends on factors such as your specific needs, budget, and ease of use. We’ve included some of the best consent management solutions in the market.
Some platforms are designed for specific industries, while others offer a wide range of features. We highly recommend you choose one that is within your budget and meets your business requirements.
You can Generate privacy policies, terms, and cookie consent for your site with these tools.
