How can I tell if the banner is working?

If you are unsure if your Cookie consent banner is working properly and if your cookies are held back by our automatic cookie blocking function or by your manual implementation of prior consent you may do the following to check whether the solution is working as intended:

1. Check your latest cookie scan report for issues
2. Do a manual check via your browser

1. Check your scan report for issues

We added built-in compliance checks to our scanner, to make sure you are automatically notified of any issues per cookie in your scan reports. Every month we advise you to check your scan report and make sure to keep an eye out for the following 3 issues:

1. Unclassified cookies found
2. Cookies not blocked prior consent
3. Cookies that send data to inadequate countries

1. Unclassified cookies

In order to make sure your cookies are blocked correctly, they need to be classified in one of the 4 categories: necessary, marketing, statistics or preference. For more information on unclassified cookies how to manually categorize them, please see: Check-your-unclassified-cookies-

2. Cookies not blocked prior consent

If a cookie is not blocked until consent has given, this will be stated in your report:

If you can see any cookies referring to this issue, it is important to check up on the cause of this. As a first step, see if you can reproduce the issue by running a manual check via your browser (see also step 2 in this article). Can you also see the cookie set before consent is provided via your browser? This is most likely due to an issue with the banner script implementation and you can use the following checklist to discover the cause:

If you are using automatic cookie blocking;

✔ Is Cookiebot the first script on the page to load

Make sure that the Cookiebot script is the very first script to load on your website. This is essential for our script’s ability to hold back cookies until consent has been obtained.

✔ Has the Cookiebot script been implemented multiple times

Both the banner and declaration script should only be implemented once, otherwise this may cause issues with auto blocking.
Example: You are using WordPress and have enabled Cookiebot via the plugin AND added the script inline to your website code.
Example: You use Google Tag Manager on your website and have enabled Cookiebot via your Tag Manager setup AND have also added the banner script inline to your source code.

✔ Check your Google Tag Manager setup

Are you using GTM to implement Cookiebot on your website? Ensure your GTM is configured to check consent settings before loading tags which set cookies.
Review our GTM installation guide here.

✔ Check whether the cookie is set by the webserver

In your Cookie report you may have cookies that are set by your webserver, also known as “server-side cookies”, these are marked like this:

Initiator: Webserver

These you will have to block by adding server-side code, to withhold these cookies until consent has been given. You may have to contact your web host or web solution vendor to find out more about these cookies. See the "Server Side Usage" section of our developer documentation for adding server-side Cookiebot logic.

If you are using manual cookie blocking;

✔ Check if your scripts have been marked up correctly

Please make sure the script has been marked up correctly as described in Manual-Markup-Guide or consider switching to autoblocking mode, to let the Cookiebot script handle the mark-up automatically.

✔ Check whether the cookie is set by the webserver

In your Cookie report you may have cookies that are set by your webserver, also known as “server-side cookies”, these are marked like this:

Initiator: Webserver

These you will have to block through server-side code, holding back the cookies until consent has been given. You may have to contact your web host or web solution vendor to find out more about these cookies. See the last part of our developer documentation for server-side usage of Cookiebot.

Not sure whether you are using automatic or manual cookie blocking? See: Automatic-or-Manual-cookie-blocking-mode-which-one-am-I-using-

3. Cookies that send data to inadequate countries

This issue is reported per cookie and you will be able to see the following text added:

For more information regarding adequate countries, please see: Make sure your users' personal data is only being sent to 'adequate' 3rd countries

2. Manual check via the browser

Please note, all below examples are from Google Chrome on Windows. Other browsers and other operating systems will have similar options but you find small deviations to the method mentioned.

1. Open a new session of your browser in private or incognito mode. In your browser hit CTRL+SHIFT+N
2. Navigate to your website and check that the cookie consent banner appears as expected.
3. Hit F12 in your browser to open developer mode. In the new window navigate to "Application" ❶ in the top menu bar and choose "Cookies" ❷ in the left hand menu under Storage.If Cookies show up, please mark them with your mouse and delete them until no cookies are present on your website.
4. Now reload your website hitting F5 in your browser. You will see the banner, and possibly some cookies appear, like this:Click a link or two on your website, to navigate to other pages, without interacting with the cookies banner. If the banner disappears, you may have "Implied consent" configured. Log in to your account, navigate to Settings -> Dialog and change this to "Explicit consent" if you want the banner to stay until prior consent has been obtained through a click on the OK button.
   
   Notice how no other cookies than the few strictly necessary cookies you may have on your website are being set.
5. Activate the Cookie Consent Banner by choosing which categories you want to opt in to and click OK. You will now see more cookies being set.

If this is not the behavior you are experiencing, please look in our help center for guidance on how to fix any potential issues. Start by looking at implementation and prior consent.