Is a cookie consent banner required?

We’ve been receiving many questions regarding the Cookie Consent Banner & the GDPR. Are you obligated to implement it into your website in the GDPR or are there exceptions? We will explain this in this article.

What are the different types of cookies?

We have written some articles upon this but perhaps good to know before answering the main question. There are three kinds of cookies:

Functional Cookies
Analytical Cookies
Advertising Cookies or Marketing Cookies
Analytical cookies

Analytical cookies keep track of which pages you visit on the website, how long you view a certain page, which page you visit afterward, and so on. Webmasters can then view this information in their statistics program (e.g. Google Analytics) and use it to improve their website.

Read more on analytical cookies here.

Functional cookies

Functional cookies are cookies that make a website perform better. Functional cookies are e.g.:

Login cookies
Shopping cart cookies
Setting reminder cookies

Read more upon functional cookies here.

Advertising or Marketing Cookies

You do not need to ask permission for the previous cookies in accordance with the GDPR. However, there are also many websites that use so-called advertising or tracking cookies; cookies that track which websites you visit and which pages or products you view there. This information is then used for advertising purposes.

Read more upon advertising cookies here.

Asking consent

When you are using advertising cookies on your website, you should always ask the consent of users on your website. You are not allowed to place these cookies without the explicit consent of the user in the GDPR law. When you are only using functional cookies, you don’t have to ask for consent or show a cookie consent banner. When using analytical cookies you should when you don’t anonymize IP addresses (Read this article how to do this in Google Analytics).
When using advertising or tracking cookies you should always explicitly ask for consent by the user. Please also note that you can never place cookies before the consent has been given!

Do you need a Cookie Consent Banner?

When you are using cookies that store personal data you always have to explicitly ask consent to the user. When you anonymize every single bit of data you don’t have to. Functional cookies don’t require the consent of the user as they are only placed for performance purposes.

Our plugin decides whether a cookie consent banner has to be shown. So you shouldn’t need to worry when using our plugin.