Usercentrics is a market leader in the area of Consent Management Platforms (CMP) and provides publishers with a software to obtain, manage, and document the consent of their site visitors. Without the users’ consent, the data collected on a site is worthless. Companies take the risk of hefty fines if their site is not compliant with the current legal privacy requirements.
Partnering with agencies, technology and data protection experts across 30+ countries, Usercentrics’ easy-to-implement, intuitive and user-friendly software helps the world’s leading organizations to implement a transparent CMP on their website and achieve GDPR and CCPA compliance.
Features
- Automatic detection of implemented third-party technologies.
- Automatic blocking of implemented third-party technologies as long as no consent is present from your site users.
- Automatic creation of relevant information about your implemented third-party technologies for your Privacy Policy.
For a list of all currently supported technologies, see the Usercentrics documentation.
Common Questions
Do I really need to implement a CMP?
If your website performs any of the following actions, you need to obtain the consent of EU/EEA citizens:
- processing personal data: for purposes like remarketing, content personalization, behavioral advertising, analytics, email marketing
- automation of decision making: for instance, profiling
- transfer of data overseas: mostly applicable to organizations processing EU citizens’ data outside of the EU
- uses special categories of data: such as on racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, genetic data, biometric data
How does Usercentrics identify tracking on my site?
The Usercentrics CMP detects the outgoing request URLs and maps them to what we call a Service. For example, we know that a request to the URL www.youtube.com is a request for the service “YouTube” and will block the request automatically as long as the user did not give the consent for the YouTube service via our CMP.
The same logic applies to many different third-party technologies like tracking and re-targeting scripts.
Can I reclassify tracking codes to other categories?
Yes. After the initial setup is complete, you can always change the category of your services in the settings interface. Open the Usercentrics dashboard and click Third-Party Technologies. Click the third-party technology you want to reclassify. You have the following options:
- Essential. These services are essential for the site to work. These may be services such as a CDN, shopping cart functionality, or browser language.
- Functional. These services are used to extend the functionality of a site. These may be services such as a video or map integration.
- Marketing. These services are used primarily for marketing and tracking. These may be services such as analytics or re-targeting.
Are there any metrics around what users do with the Consent widget in my site?
We will soon offer an analytics dashboard where site owners can get a feel for how their users interact with the CMP in the Business package.
How will the Usercentrics CMP affect my analytics data if the user does not consent?
Usercentrics respects the privacy settings of your users. If a user has not consented to a certain service (for example, Analytics), the Usercentrics CMP prevents the execution of that particular script. As a result, the number of visitors in your statistics may decrease slightly after implementing the app.
What happens when I update the site and add or remove third-party technologies? How are new technologies added to my CMP configuration?
When you add new third-party technologies to your site, we recommend you rerun the crawler, so the technology is detected by the Usercentrics CMP. To rerun the crawler, go to the dashboard of the Usercentrics App and click Rerun crawler at the bottom. The crawler will scan your updated site and automatically add newly detected services to your CMP configuration.
When you remove a third-party technology you can simply delete the service from your CMP configuration by going to the Usercentrics App dashboard and clicking Delete next to the service you removed from your site.
For compliance reasons, the Usercentrics CMP will never automatically delete any services, but will automatically add newly detected ones.
What if I add technologies using custom code?
You will soon be able to create custom Services with our Business package. You will then have the option to describe any kind of custom technology to your users and will not be restricted to using our predefined texts.
Also coming with the Business package is the option for you to manually adjust your custom code so that it is only executed when a user opts-in.
What if I use a Tag Manager to add my third-party technologies?
To the Usercentrics CMP, it does not matter if the third-party technology is implemented directly into the site or via a Tag Manager. The CMP detects outgoing requests as soon as they happen and blocks the execution of those scripts.
Can I show the banner only to users in the EU or does it have to be for everyone?
With the Business package, you are able to display the banner only to EU users and obtain explicit consent only from those users.
Will the automatic blocking of third-party technologies going to affect my site performance?
In terms of page speed the automatic blocking of third-party technologies will not negatively affect your site’s performance. The blocking of those technologies can even speed up your site, as fewer files have to be requested and transferred to your users.
How do you support multilingual sites?
The Usercentrics CMP will always have English as a default and fallback language. In the Free package, you can add up to one additional language to your CMP configuration. We will first display the corresponding language based on your site languages and the user's browser language. The user can switch between languages at any point. Please note that if you configure the app to a different language than those of your site, the default language presented to the user may be incorrect.
With the Business package, you are able to add 30+ languages. For a full list of supported languages, see the Usercentrics documentation.
What should I do if someone is complaining that the site is saving cookies although it should not?
Some cookies are categorized as essential, and are therefore needed in order for your site to work correctly. These could be session cookies, cookies that save the language preference of your users, or cookies that are needed for an eCommerce shopping cart functionality.
Will I be able to see stats and run ad campaigns when third-party technologies are blocked?
Yes! The only difference may be that your analytics tools will only have data on users that consented to it and also your ads will only be visible to users that opted-in.
What will be displayed instead of blocked elements such as YouTube videos?
The Usercentrics CMP will display on certain visual elements (for example, YouTube videos, Google Maps, Soundcloud embeddings, and so on) a placeholder instead of the actual content and request an opt-in from the users in order to be able to interact with the content. This is a large part of our effort to optimize opt-in rates based on what we call contextual consent layers along the user journey.
What are the customization options that I have for the consent banner?
In the Business package, you have the option to choose from two predefined themes: Light and Dark. Additionally, you are able to set a brand color and upload your logo to further customize the appearance of the consent banner in order for it to fully match your corporate design.
Clearing Browser Cache
After you make updates to Usercentrics (such as changing the privacy URL) on a live site, you will have to clear your browser cache to see the changes on a live site.
Additional Resources
To access the Usercentrics knowledge base, and find the latest information, see the Usercentrics Knowledge Base.
For frequently asked questions, see https://usercentrics.com/faqs/.
For other Usercentrics resources, see https://usercentrics.com/resources/.